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Eat bread. You don't know if it's been polluted. Drink water, you don't know whether it's been polluted. So living is a test.
John Henrik Clarke
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John Henrik Clarke
Age: 83 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 1
Died: 1998
Died: July 16
Historian
Writer
Union Springs
Alabama
John Clarke
Living
Polluted
Test
Bread
Tests
Drink
Whether
Water
More quotes by John Henrik Clarke
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.
John Henrik Clarke
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
John Henrik Clarke
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
John Henrik Clarke
Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.
John Henrik Clarke
The Arabs are deep in the slave trade right now.
John Henrik Clarke
The African had opinions about the universe that eventually turned out to be true.
John Henrik Clarke
No more religion anymore. No more who's a Moslem and who's a Protestant.
John Henrik Clarke
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
John Henrik Clarke
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.
John Henrik Clarke
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.
John Henrik Clarke
You look at a clock and it tells you it's eight o'clock, you know the number of hours that has been before eight you know the number of hours you've got after eight. You can now measure your time to see if you can get done a number of things you've got to get done. History serves the same purpose.
John Henrik Clarke
We never see ourselves as heroes and sometimes when we do it is a hero that has made a fortune as a clown or a boxer. And there is no lasting value in either one of those.
John Henrik Clarke
Man's attitude towards the universe and his opinion of the universe predates the scientific probe of the universe.
John Henrik Clarke
All life is a test one way or the other.
John Henrik Clarke
We're in a world of propaganda. Some of it is all to effective.
John Henrik Clarke
In the African matrilineal society, the lineage of the bloodline comes down through the female side. The Arabs who invaded East Africa and other parts of Africa reversed it to the patrilineal where everything comes down through the male side and the woman has no basic rights except that which the male is willing to grant her.
John Henrik Clarke
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.
John Henrik Clarke
I have no faith in much organized religion because I think it's by a bunch of hypocrites and practiced by a bunch of hypocrites. They don't mean what they say because all of them are in the slave trade one way or the other.
John Henrik Clarke
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.
John Henrik Clarke
We 've lost something else: the relationship between men and women.
John Henrik Clarke
