I want to make it clear that the black race did not come to the United States culturally empty-handed. The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the significance of recognizing and valuing one's cultural heritage and history.
John Henrik Clarke highlights that the black race brought with them rich cultural histories and talents upon arriving in the United States. Understanding and valuing this heritage is crucial for fostering pride, self-worth, and the ability to utilize one's gifts effectively.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech at a cultural festival to emphasize the importance of celebrating one's roots.
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.
As immigrants, we understand better than most that to be an American is a privilege that conveys not just rights but responsibilities.
Fame is damaging when people become reliant on it for their sense of self, and their identity, when fame is linked to how you see yourself.
I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.
While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind - qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.
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