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 thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
Would America have been America without her Negro people?
Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind.
This wicked man Hitler, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred. this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.
When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.
Let Indian history be set side by side with Europe history with what there is of the latter century by century and let us see whether India need blush at the comparison.
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