John Henrik Clarke

John Henrik Clarke was born in Union Springs, Alabama, on the first of January 1915, the son of sharecroppers, and raised in Columbus, Georgia. He left for Harlem at seventeen, never completing a high school degree, and educated himself across the next six decades while working in factories and as a journalist.

He worked as a research director at the Harlem Liberator newspaper through the 1940s, served on the editorial board of Freedomways magazine from its founding in 1961, and edited Harlem U.S.A. and Harlem: A Community in Transition — the principal anthologies of mid-twentieth-century Harlem letters and politics. He helped found the African Heritage Studies Association in 1968 and chaired the Department of Africana and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College from 1969 to 1986 — building one of the first Black Studies programs in the American university system.

He was largely autodidactic until 1992, when at the age of seventy-seven and already with thirty published books and an academic chair to his credit, he was awarded his PhD from Pacific Western University. The degree was conferred for the body of historical scholarship he had produced across the previous half-century.

His sustained scholarly emphasis — the African origins of ancient civilizations, the centrality of African agency in African history, and the political theory of Pan-Africanism — placed him in the intellectual lineage of Cheikh Anta Diop and W. E. B. Du Bois (both placed in this archive). Henrik Clarke was a personal mentor to Maya Angelou and to the journalist Carlos Moore.

He died in New York on the sixteenth of July 1998, age eighty-three.

He is honored here as the autodidactic historian who built Black Studies as an academic discipline.