Explore Quotes by John Henrik Clarke

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

Had Elijah Muhammad tried to introduce an orthodox form of Arab-oriented Islam, I doubt if he would have attracted 500 people, but he introduced a form of Islam that would communicate with the people he had to deal with. He was the king to those who had no king, and he was the messiah to those some people thought unworthy of a messiah.

The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.

I caddied for Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley long before they became generals or president, for that matter. Just between you and me, Bradley tipped better than Eisenhower did.

The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.

Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again. Some of them came out and found a new meaning to their manhood and their womanhood.

The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.

To control a people you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture. And when your conqueror makes you ashamed of your culture and your history, he needs no prison walls and no chains to hold you.

To be black and beautiful means nothing in this world unless we are black and powerful.

Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they colonized information about the world.

We will have taken one giant step forward when we face this reality: Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take their power away from them.

Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.

It's time for Black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up.

Everything that touches YOUR life, must be an instrument of YOUR liberation or tossed into the trash cans of HISTORY

Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact

Every form of true education trains the student in self-reliance

I will only debate with my equals. All others I teach.

Whoever is in control of the hell in your life, is your devil.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sovereign political entity in world affairs was still a dream without fulfillment.

When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'