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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the shared African heritage of people in the Americas, who often identify with the regions where they were enslaved rather than their true origins.
John Henrik Clarke's quote drives home the importance of recognizing the collective identity of Africans brought to the Americas through slavery. It highlights how individuals of African descent in the U.S. and the Caribbean have adopted nationalities based on where they were taken, rather than acknowledging their common ancestral roots as Africans. This distinction is vital for understanding cultural unity and the historical context of the African diaspora.
In practice
In a discussion about cultural identity during a history class.
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.
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.
If you read about millions of people doing this and millions of people doing that, history seems remote and inaccessible.
In the 1930s, the government paid writers to interview 80- and 90-year-old former slaves, and I read those accounts. I came away realizing - not surprisingly - that many slave masters were sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.
I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.
The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the future of Christian civilisation.
No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.
There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.
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