Dr john henrik clarke biography

Dr. John Henrik Clarke was a Pan-Africanist writer, historian, associate lecturer, and a pioneer in the way of Africana studies and professional institutions in domain starting in the late 1960s.

Born Bathroom Henry Clark on January 1, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama, John left the kindred farm in Columbus in 1933 cue Harlem, New York during the time some historians refer to as; Depiction Great Migration.

This period refers to description time during 1910 and 1970, hoop African Americans moved from the south states, to the northern states locked in search of work and a short holiday quality of life.

There he pursued learning and activism. He renamed himself pass for John Henrik, after the rebel Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and added an “e” to wreath surname, spelling it as “Clarke.” Honourableness reasoning for this is unknown, despite the fact that John did not document this replacement in any of his personal diaries.

Career
Arriving in Harlem at the extract of 18 in 1933, Clarke developed renovation a writer and lecturer during the Great Depression years, becoming a part of blue blood the gentry movement we now understand as glory Harlem Renaissance.
Much of this operation came through Clarke becoming a participator of several study circles such variety the Harlem History Club and the Harlem Writers’ Workshop.

However, a formal education was sob something Clarke completed as he affected intermittently at New York University, Columbia University, Huntsman College, the New School of Social Research and the League for Professional Writers.
Explicit was an autodidact whose mentors included the scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.

From 1941 to 1945, Clarke served as a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army Air Forces, ultimately attaining integrity rank of master sergeant.

In the post-World Enmity II era, there was new artistic situation, with small presses and magazines utilize founded and surviving for brief period. Writers and publishers continued to initiate new enterprises: Clarke was co-founder show signs of the Harlem Quarterly (1949–51), book review editor marketplace the Negro History Bulletin (1948–52), associate editor promote to the magazine, Freedomways, and a feature writer promote the Black-owned Pittsburgh Courier.

Clarke taught at blue blood the gentry New School for Social Research stranger 1956 to 1958. Traveling in West Africa in 1958–59, he met Kwame Nkrumah, whom he abstruse mentored as a student in ethics US, and was offered a job method as a journalist for the Ghana Even News. He also lectured at the University of Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, inclusive of in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan.

Academic Career
Clarke was the founding chairman of the fork of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, a subsidiary longed-for City University of New York in the middle of 1969 and 1986.

Additionally, Clarke was forename as the Carter G. Woodson Memorable Visiting Professor of African History at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center, formation the African Heritage Studies Association along with say publicly Black Caucus of the African Studies Association in 1968- two causes which helped him become a founding chairman.

This jump carry too far ‘farm-boy’ to ‘professional academic’ is eminent in The New York Times death notice of Jon, which read; the activist’s ascension to professor emeritus at Huntsman College was “unusual… without benefit grounding a high school diploma, let elude a Ph.D.,” while acknowledging that “nobody said Professor Clarke wasn’t an erudite original.”

In 1994, Clarke earned a degree from the non-accredited Pacific Western Formation (now California Miramar University) in Los Angeles, having earned a bachelor’s degree present-day in 1992.

Legacy

John Henrick Clarke’s greatest turn of influence resides in the 1960’s where he was a prominent scholar during the Black Power Movement, fostering studies on the African-American experience distinguished the place of Africans in imitation history. He challenged the views hint at academic historians and helped shift description way African history was studied meticulous taught.
Clarke was “a scholar zealous to redressing what he saw rightfully a systematic and racist suppression view distortion of African history by word-of-mouth accepted scholars.” And accused his detractors domination having Eurocentric views. His writing included six erudite books and many scholarly articles. Recognized also edited anthologies of writing make wet African Americans, as well as collections of his own short stories. Add on addition, he published general interest articles.

In one especially heated controversy, Clarke severed and contributed to an anthology hark back to essays attacking William Styron, an American Columnist who wrote and the novel The Confessions forfeited Nat Turner; the leader of glory Virginia slave revolt in 1831.

Besides commandment at Hunter College and Cornell Founding, Clarke founded professional associations to establish the study of Black culture. Explicit was a founder with Leonard Jeffries and pull it off president of the African Heritage Studies Association, which supported scholars in areas of history, culture, literature and illustriousness arts. He was a founding contributor of other organisations to support reading in black culture: the Black Institute of Arts and Letters and ethics African-American Scholars’ Council.

Honors

1985 – Faculty refer to the Africana Studies and Research Sentiment at Cornell University named the Lavatory Henrik Clarke Library after him.

1995 – Carter G. Woodson Medallion, Association be the Study of Afro-American Life squeeze History.

2002 – Molefi Kete Asante listed Dr. Can Henrik Clarke as one of his 100 Greatest African Americans.