John Henrik Clarke Quotes

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

The African had opinions about the universe that eventually turned out to be true.

To control a people you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture. And when your conqueror makes you ashamed of your culture and your history, he needs no prison walls and no chains to hold you.

Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact

We're all in a test. With or without God, we're in a test.

I attended a Baptist church as a child and was an avid reader starting with the Bible.

You walk out in the street, we don't know if we're going to get across. It's a test.

I believe in spirituality, which is out there.

Attending church is one thing, belonging is another.

There has been a struggle to reclaim the African self. That struggle has been on the part of a minority of dedicated African-Americans who never gave up our African identity at no time during our stay here.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

Whoever is in control of the hell in your life, is your devil.

I could pull all kinds of games on my mother. I couldn't pull any games on my father.

Man's most intelligent age may have gotten lost in history.

Violence among all people is based on dissatisfaction, frustration and crushed ambition and people who don't know who to strike at and who to blame, and not willing to blame themselves.

With no specific procedure, man arrived at sweeping conclusions about the universe that have proven to be true.

I am a nationalist, and a Pan-Africanist, first and foremost. I was well grounded in history before ever taking a history course. I did not spend much formal time in school - I had to work.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

In a collective society, everybody's business is everybody's business.

I have gone up in the Pyramids and the stones are so close together you can't force a playing card between them and (they are) in perfect alignment. So those people must have had some hydraulics or something. You take 20 men, put them around a big stone, their legs would get in the way. Even if they could lift it, 20 pairs of legs hitting against each other would throw it off balance. And they would not have it in exact alignment. Not even a fraction of an inch off.

If the Africans and Arabs were ruling Spain from 711 to 1492, had they destroyed the Catholic church, they still would be ruling Spain to this day because that's the institution that held them together. The institute that gave them the only hope was their church. This is why we are so depressed because the institutions of hope that would cause fulfillment amongst us has either been destroyed or laughed at.

My loving sister Mary has always shared the pain and pleasure of my heartbeat in a unique and special way. We have sung our sad and warm songs together.

In a matrilineal society, a woman has basic rights that no one has to grant her but you can't take it away from her because the society is based on the concept that the lifegiver is equal to those she gave the life to. And that will remain... until you find a pregnant man.

Anytime you turn on your own concept of God, you are no longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on your body, because the chains are on your mind.

No more religion anymore. No more who's a Moslem and who's a Protestant.

Malcolm X found the language that communicated across the board, from college professor to floor sweeper, all at the same time, without demeaning the intellect of either.

You look at the Pyramids. They're not one fraction of an inch off in terms of their alignment. They were built without a bonding agent.

There's such a craving to make Egypt white or Asian, people don't just even listen to you. When you explain why would anyone build anything as enduring as the Pyramids in Africa before they would build anything of that nature at home?

What has been imposed on religion is not religion itself but the custom of those who have been converted to it. I think that the most atrocious of all of this is Islam. They were in the slave trade before Islam. The Arabs were natural slave traders. They were the people who were called on to conquer us, unfortunately.

When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sovereign political entity in world affairs was still a dream without fulfillment.

I think that Jesus-dependency has taken over our minds, and too many of our institutions.

Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.

You shouldn't bear humiliations.

Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they colonized information about the world.

History is a compass that you locate yourself on the map of human geography, politically, culturally, financially.

...education has but one honorable purpose, one alone, everything else is a waste of time......that is to train the student to be a proper handler of power.

The standard reason for Thanksgiving doesn't mean nothing to me.

If God is love, then God has no stepchildren to love.

My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.

If I lead the field in any way, it is in the area of curricula development, study guides and other teaching materials.

Now, Jews integrate but they don't destroy their institutions. They don't close the synagogue. They don't stop having special Jewish graveyards. They don't stop having special Jewish holidays. Why can't we understand that we can have things special to us and still comingle and integrate with others.

I have walked majestically with kings and queens and presidents and other heads of states.

I say if black people don't unite and begin to support themselves, their communities and their families, they might as well begin to go out of business as a people. Nobody's going to have any mercy. And nobody's going to have any compunction about making slaves out of them.

My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

When people laugh at your institutions and convince you that you have to adopt theirs - adopt their dress, adopt their taste in food - you are a prisoner to those people.

In Africa, the woman was co-equal. In Europe, the woman was a vassal. To some extent, she still is.