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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a realization of the absence of accurate representations of African people in education, prompting a quest for historical truth.
John Henrik Clarke expresses a profound concern about the lack of representation of African individuals in educational materials, specifically in Sunday school lessons. This absence prompted him to question the narratives he was presented with and led to a lifelong pursuit of understanding and uncovering the true history of African people. The quote highlights the importance of accurate representation and the impact of education on identity and self-awareness.
In practice
In a speech about cultural representation, one could mention this quote to highlight the necessity of diverse historical narratives.
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 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.
What’s strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.
I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
Do you wish to learn? There are books that can teach you anything, and there is no cheaper form of education, nor one whose effects are more lasting. My education came from books, and they have been my companions by many campfires, in bunkhouses, ships' forecastles, in hotels and on planes. No matter where you find me, I am never far from a book.
Children have always brought a tremendous amount of joy to me and I feel that if you can catch them at a young age you can really change a life. There are a lot of studies that show that one act of kindness to these children has a 40% chance of making that child have a completely different outcome in their life. What you hope is that you can get a kid to believe in something and to believe in themselves.
Education is a slow moving but powerful force
Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.
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