John Henrik Clarke

John Henrik Clarke was born John Henry Clark on the first of January 1915 in Union Springs, Alabama, the child of a sharecropping family. When he was young the family moved to the mill town of Columbus, Georgia, hoping to earn enough to own land rather than work another man's. There he read hungrily in whatever books he could find, and he later recalled being told that Africa had no history worth the name — a claim he would spend his life refuting.

In 1933, at eighteen, he left the South by freight train for Harlem, part of the Great Migration. He never earned a high school diploma, yet he made Harlem his university, studying in its libraries and lyceums and among its writers and elders. He renamed himself John Henrik, after the playwright Henrik Ibsen, and added an "e" to Clarke. A self-trained historian, he authored, edited, or contributed to more than two dozen books and countless essays on African and African-American history.

From 1969 to 1986 he served as the founding chairman of the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, and he was the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History at Cornell University's Africana Studies and Research Center. In 1968 he helped found, and became first president of, the African Heritage Studies Association.

Against the grain of the academy, he insisted that Africa stood at the center of human history, not its margins, and he helped make Africana Studies a discipline in its own right. He died in New York City on the sixteenth of July 1998. May his name endure as a compass by which a people find themselves on the map of human history.