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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
Polluted
Test
Bread
Tests
Drink
Whether
Water
Living
More quotes by John Henrik Clarke
The African had opinions about the universe that eventually turned out to be true.
John Henrik Clarke
What example do you have of anything like the Pyramids outside of Africa? You have them in Mexico, but that can be traced to early African migration. So the African created mound culture.
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
In a collective society, everybody's business is everybody's business.
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
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
I think many times we charge the Lord for things we can do ourselves. If only we realized how well we have been equipped.
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
History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are but, more importantly, what they must be.
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
The people and the cultures of what is known as Africa are older than the word 'Africa.' According to most records, old and new, Africans are the oldest people on the face of the earth. The people now called Africans not only influenced the Greeks and the Romans, they influenced the early world before there was a place called Europe.
John Henrik Clarke
You shouldn't bear humiliations.
John Henrik Clarke
All life is a test one way or the other.
John Henrik Clarke
This kind of collective society - giving to each according to his need - existed in Africa not only before Karl Marx, but also before Europe.
John Henrik Clarke
In Africa, the woman was co-equal. In Europe, the woman was a vassal. To some extent, she still is.
John Henrik Clarke
The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.
John Henrik Clarke
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.
John Henrik Clarke
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.
John Henrik Clarke
People rise and fall on the basis of the makings of institutions.
John Henrik Clarke
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.
John Henrik Clarke
