The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.
Interpretation
Acknowledging the true history and contributions of African-Americans in academia has been challenging due to the lasting impacts of slavery.
John Henrik Clarke's quote highlights the difficult journey toward the acceptance of African-American history and its scholars within the academic community. Despite the end of slavery, the harmful stereotypes and misrepresentations of black individuals continued to overshadow their true contributions and experiences, making it hard for their narratives to gain recognition and legitimacy in scholarly discourse.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture on African-American history to emphasize the importance of addressing historical narratives.
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
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.
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge - which in 2013 was declared a National Historic Landmark - isn't symbolic of the Civil War in a meaningful way. It is, however, the modern-day battlefield where the voting rights movement was born.
Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life - into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood.
If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you.
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great many of our cattle. Some branded our young cattle so they could claim them.
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