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Dr. John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998)

Dr. Clarke is the author of several books.
There are many YouTube videos with him.

The third book on the right is his tribute to Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop.

In the video below, Dr. Clarke gives a tribute to Dr. Diop.

Dr. John Henrik Clarke was an American historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and African studies, and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s. Clarke was a professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York from 1969 to 1986, where he served as founding chairman of the department. He also was the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History at Cornell University's African Studies and Research Center.  Additionally, in 1968 he founded the African Heritage Studies Association and the Black Caucus of the African Studies Association. In 1994, Clarke earned a doctorate from the Pacific Western University (now Calfornia Miramar Univeristy) in Los Angeles, having earned a bachelor's degree there in 1992.

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Clarke taught at the New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1958. raveling in West Africa in 1958–59, he met Kwame Nkrumah  whom he had mentored as a student in the US and was offered a job working as a journalist for the Ghana Evening News.  He also lectured at the University of Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, including in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan.

 

Becoming prominent during the Black Power movement in the 1960s, which began to advocate a kind of black nationalism, Clarke advocated for studies of the African-American experience and the place of Africans in world history. He challenged the views of academic historians and helped shift the way African history was studied and taught.

 

Clarke was "a scholar devoted to redressing what he saw as a systematic and racist suppression and distortion of African history by traditional scholars." He accused his detractors of having Eurocentric views. His writing included six scholarly books and many scholarly articles. He also edited anthologies of writing by African Americans, as well as collections of his own short stories. In addition, Clarke published general interest articles.

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Besides teaching at Hunter College and Cornell University, Clarke founded professional associations to support the study of black culture. He was a founder with Leonard Jeffries and first president of the African Heritage Studies Association which supported scholars in areas of history, culture, literature, and the arts. He was a founding member of other organizations to support work in black culture: the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and the African-American Scholars' Council.
 

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