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John Henrik Clarke, Black Studies Advocate, Dies at 83
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.
Published: July 20, 1998
John Henrik Clarke, an Alabama sharecropper's son whose thirst for unfettered knowledge led
him to hop a freight train to New York and transform himself into an African history scholar
who helped spur the development of black studies and who spent six decades as a gadfly fixture
in the intellectual life of Harlem, died on Thursday at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. He
was 83.
The cause was a heart attack, his family said.
Mr. Clarke was a professor emeritus at Hunter College. If it is unusual to become a full college
professor without benefit of a high school diploma, let alone a Ph.D., nobody said Professor
Clarke wasn't an academic original.
An eighth-grade dropout who eventually took courses at New York University and Columbia but
never graduated, Professor Clarke, who ultimately received a doctorate from the nonaccredited
Pacific Western University in Los Angeles at age 78, was hardly stymied by the lack of formal
academic credentials.
Indeed, as a scholar devoted to redressing what he saw as a systematic and racist suppression
and distortion of African history by traditional scholars, he said he had not missed all that much.
In a varied career in which he wrote 6 books, edited and contributed to 17 others, composed
more than 50 short stories, turned out a stream of articles and pamphlets, helped found or edit
several important black quarterlies, lectured widely and did research in every African country
except South Africa, Mr. Clarke, largely self-taught and highly outspoken, became an imposing
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John Henrik Clarke, Black Studies Advocate, Dies at 83 - New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/20/arts/john-henrik-clarke-black-studie...
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figure in black intellectual circles.
A native of Union Springs, Ala., who moved to Georgia as an infant, Mr. Clarke demonstrated his
academic prowess early, once amazing one of his teachers by ''reading'' a seamless English essay.
The teacher later realized, after seeing the student's pages were blank, that the essay had been
composed on the fly. (A man with a prodigious memory, Mr. Clarke later amazed his students
and lecture audiences by delivering complex, detailed lectures without notes.)
Mr. Clarke, who left school to help support his family with jobs that included caddying for
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar N. Bradley and other officers at Fort Benning, Ga., came to New
York in 1933 partly because he had become enchanted by tales of the literary and cultural fervor
of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's and partly because, as a black youth in segregated
Georgia, he was not allowed to check books out of the local library.
Once he arrived in New York he haunted the city's libraries and gravitated to an influential
personal tutor, Arnold A. Schomburg, the scholar whose library became the foundation for the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Like Mr. Schomburg, Mr. Clarke said he had
been led to study African history after being told that black Africans had no history before
European colonization.
If some of the scholarship he championed was dismissed by traditional historians as specious
propaganda seeking to aggrandize African influence on Western culture, Mr. Clarke threw the
charge right back, accusing white scholars of having disguised their own Eurocentric
propaganda as historic fact.
Whatever the truth, Mr. Clarke relished the fray, among other things editing a 1968 book,
''William Styron's Nat Turner: 10 Black Scholars Respond,'' in which he and the other
contributors accused Mr. Styron of painting a false picture of slavery and of Turner's character in
his acclaimed novel, ''The Confessions of Nat Turner.''
Other collections Mr. Clarke edited include ''American Negro Short Stories'' (1966), ''Malcolm X:
The Man and His Times'' (1969), ''Harlem U.S.A.'' (1971) and ''Marcus Garvey and the Vision of
Africa'' (1973).
By the time he joined the Hunter faculty as a lecturer in 1969, Mr. Clarke, who quickly
established black studies programs there and at Cornell, had supported himself in a series of
low-paying jobs, served a wartime stint in the Army Air Forces and emerged as a key figure in
the 1960's movement to celebrate black culture. Among other things, he had been director of the
Heritage Teaching Program for the anti-poverty agency Haryou-Act (Harlem Youth-Associated
Community Teams) and a consultant and coordinator of the 1968 CBS television series ''Black
Heritage: The History of Afro-Americans.''
A gregarious man whose Harlem home became a way station for visiting Africans, Mr. Clarke,
whose interest in modern African affairs led him to support the pan-African political movement,
was on a first-name basis with many African leaders.
Once, when he was stranded in Ghana without funds, he bumped into a man he had known in
New York years earlier, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, who promptly gave him a
Government research job.
Years later, when a younger colleague told Mr. Clarke how proud he had been to meet Eduardo
Mondlane, the founder of the Mozambique Liberation Front, Mr. Clarke nodded and recalled
that during his visits to New York, Mr. Mondlane always stayed at his home.
Mr. Clarke is survived by his wife, Sybil Williams Clarke; two children from a previous marriage,
a daughter, Nzinga, and a son, Sonni, both of Manhattan; a sister, Eddie Mary Hobbs; two
stepbrothers, Walter and Hugh Clarke, and a stepsister, Earlene Clarke, all of Columbus, Ga.
Photo: John Henrik Clarke, a sharecropper's son, gravitated to the intellectual life of Harlem and
the study of African history. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times, 1971)
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John Henrik Clarke, Black Studies Advocate, Dies at 83 - New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/20/arts/john-henrik-clarke-black-studie...
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