John Henrik Clarke quotes:

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the United States would enter, in a formal way, what had been up to that date strictly a European conflict. Marcus Garvey's prophecy about the European scramble to maintain dominance over the whole world was now a reality.

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.

Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds.

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.

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.'

It is unfortunate that so much of the history of Africa has been written by conquerors, foreigners, missionaries and adventurers. The Egyptians left the best record of their history written by local writers.

I want to make it clear that the black race did not come to the United States culturally empty-handed. The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories.

I caddied for Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley long before they became generals or president, for that matter. Just between you and me, Bradley tipped better than Eisenhower did.

My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.

She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.

We have been educated into believing someone else's concept of the deity, and someone else's standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you do that, you don't apologize.

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.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

In order to have a charismatic leader, you have to have a charismatic program. Because if you have a charismatic program, then if you can read you can lead. When the leader gets killed while you're reading from page 13 of your charismatic program, you can bury the man with honors, then continue the plan by reading from page 14. Let's keep on.

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.

The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.

I question the political judgement of those who would have the nerve to paint Christ white with his obvious African nose, lips and wooly hair.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

If I lead the field in any way, it is in the area of curricula development, study guides and other teaching materials.

Anytime you turn on your own concept of God, you are no longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on your body, because the chains are on your mind.

When the early Europeans first met Africans, at the crossroads of history, it was a respectful meeting and the Africans were not slaves. Their nations were old before Europe was born.

Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.

When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'

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.

There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.

Africa and its people are the most written about and the least understood of all of the world's people. This condition started in the 15th and the 16th centuries with the beginning of the slave trade system. The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people.

The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.

Malcolm X found the language that communicated across the board, from college professor to floor sweeper, all at the same time, without demeaning the intellect of either.

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience's attention, then he can teach his lesson.

Africa and its people are the most written about and the least understood of all of the world's people. This condition started in the 15th and the 16th centuries with the beginning of the slave trade system. The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people."

Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.

It is too often forgotten that when the Europeans gained enough maritime skills and gunpowder to conquer most of the world, they not only colonized the bulk of the world's people but they colonized the interpretation of history itself. Human history was rewritten to favor them at the expense of other people. The roots of modern racism can be traced to this conquest and colonization.

There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called Ethiopians, for the Greeks referred to Africa as, 'The Land Of The Burnt-Face People.'

As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.

Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.

I have walked majestically with kings and queens and presidents and other heads of states.

White people think when you love yourself you hate them. No, when I love myself they become irrelevant to me.

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.

Everything that touches YOUR life, must be an instrument of YOUR liberation or tossed into the trash cans of HISTORY

Each generation must assume the responsibility of securing their manhood, their womanhood, the definition of their being on earth that in the final analysis is nationhood.

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.

Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again. Some of them came out and found a new meaning to their manhood and their womanhood.

All the working-class people could feel a Malcolm X. They could hear Malcolm X, and two weeks later they could whisper back what he said. Verbatim. They could remember the way he put it, and he put it so well.

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.

Had Elijah Muhammad tried to introduce an orthodox form of Arab-oriented Islam, I doubt if he would have attracted 500 people, but he introduced a form of Islam that would communicate with the people he had to deal with. He was the king to those who had no king, and he was the messiah to those some people thought unworthy of a messiah.

What I have learned is that a whole lot of people with degrees don't know a damn thing, and a lot of people with no degrees are brilliant.

The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.

A people's relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.

To control a people you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture. And when your conqueror makes you ashamed of your culture and your history, he needs no prison walls and no chains to hold you.

If you expect the present day school system to give history to you, you are dreaming. This, we have to do ourselves. The Chinese didn't go out in the world and beg people to teach Chinese studies or let them teach Chinese studies. The Japanese didn't do that either. People don't beg other people to restore their history; they do it themselves.

Our concept of beauty is taken from Hollywood, which is anti-black. We don't see ourselves as beautiful in most cases. Although we are naturally one of the most beautiful peoples out there, we don't see it. We don't get the point. Hollywood sets the standards.

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.

Most human behavior is controlled by images. Image is a factor in how people look at themselves and what they use to reflect themselves. The control of images is a major factor in world power.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

The population of African people in the United States is far in excess of six small European nations. Where we are going? We have to go back as best we can to where slavery and colonialism took us from. And they took us from a concept of nation management and nation maintenance. We have been so long away from home we unfortunately have forgotten how we ruled states before the foreigners got there.

You have to convince the adults that if a child is to learn his culture, he or she will have to see his mother and father reading about it, and explaining it to him. Then it gets a legitimacy it otherwise would never have. Until then, his learning is limited.

To be black and beautiful means nothing in this world unless we are black and powerful.

It's time for Black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up.

We will have taken one giant step forward when we face this reality: Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take their power away from them.

Whoever is in control of the hell in your life, is your devil.

I only debate my equals. All others I teach.

In Africa, the woman was co-equal. In Europe, the woman was a vassal. To some extent, she still is.

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.

Service is the highest form of prayer as far as I am concerned.

People get overwhelmed with folklore as fact. Take the Exodus. The Exodus did not occur. It could not have occurred. Wasn't necessary for it to occur. The Jews walked into Africa over a 16-mile land until they built the Suez Canal - that land is still there. Why would they have to leave by the sea. They didn't come by the sea. Certain people think you are against their religion when you use common sense.

It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances.

I don't attend any particular church now. I don't believe in denominations, nor do I believe in organized religion.

We 've lost something else: the relationship between men and women.

I think many times we charge the Lord for things we can do ourselves. If only we realized how well we have been equipped.

We're all in a test. With or without God, we're in a test.

...education has but one honorable purpose, one alone, everything else is a waste of time......that is to train the student to be a proper handler of power.

Every form of true education trains the student in self-reliance

You can see in our churches most of the males are pastors. Most of the deacons are males. But if the woman withdrew her support from our churches, you'd have to close the doors.

If you struck your mother or your father, it was punishable by death because you struck at the whole society. You struck at the morality of the society itself. This is what we have lost.

Some of us say, "Lord knows how much I can bear". I think you can assume that you can bear more than you have a right to bear.

I could pull all kinds of games on my mother. I couldn't pull any games on my father.

Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact

If people do not know where they have been and what they have been they don't know what they are. They don't know where they going to have to go or where they still have to be.

History is a compass that you locate yourself on the map of human geography, politically, culturally, financially.

Man's attitude towards the universe and his opinion of the universe predates the scientific probe of the universe.

African people need to stop shouting 'nationtime' until they are clear about the responsibilities of running a nation.

I think that you're just as close to Jesus if you use the equipment he gave you other than to call on him to do for you what you can do for yourself.

I believe in doing good for good's sake.

If we don't unite, chances are we will go back into slavery.

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.

What we might have been dealing with here - with the building of the Pyramids - is an age that got lost. Man had to learn again what they previously had known.

You should not bear insults.

The standard reason for Thanksgiving doesn't mean nothing to me.

We have different levels of slavery. We've got educational slavery. All the major religions of the world, even Christianity and Islam, are engaged in some form of servitude of people. I don't look favorably on either one although I think properly practiced all religions are basically good.

The Arabs are deep in the slave trade right now.

If God is love, then God has no stepchildren to love.

If the Africans and Arabs were ruling Spain from 711 to 1492, had they destroyed the Catholic church, they still would be ruling Spain to this day because that's the institution that held them together. The institute that gave them the only hope was their church. This is why we are so depressed because the institutions of hope that would cause fulfillment amongst us has either been destroyed or laughed at.

If you don't like the situation, if you are afraid and can't deal with it, nothing wrong with your legs, get out of there.

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.

Man's most intelligent age may have gotten lost in history.

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.

Most of the Pyramids were observatories in perfect alignment. Some Pyramids were aligned so that the sun would hit them at a certain time of the year. And yet, it could rain all year, and not a drop of rain could get inside. No one covered the hole. So that took some high intelligence to line a thing up so that the exact time of year when the sun was in the exact position, it would light up the inside of that crypt.

In a collective society, everybody's business is everybody's business.

The southern white Baptists now want to integrate with the black Baptist church. I say that would be the end of it. In the first place, most white southern Baptists can't preach, their intentions are not that good and we make a different joyful noise unto the Lord than white people. When we say, "Lord Jesus, personal savior", we may not mean the same thing as what they mean.

Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they colonized information about the world.

The impact of racism has changed our look at ourselves because basically racism was meant to make us look unfaithfully at ourselves, and to not treasure our institutions.

After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the great independent states in West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western slave trade and the Arabs were in the slave trade before Islam and they are still in the slave trade.

Your behavior determines, to some extent, the destiny of your nation and your group.

When people laugh at your institutions and convince you that you have to adopt theirs - adopt their dress, adopt their taste in food - you are a prisoner to those people.

Whoever the Lord is, he'd give us a facility. He's given you hands, legs and might so you use that facility to rise above the lowly status. Failing that, he gave you two good legs, just run like hell.

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.

To make one people better than the other would be ungodly in the first place.

You shouldn't bear humiliations.

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.

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.

All life is a test one way or the other.

Now, Jews integrate but they don't destroy their institutions. They don't close the synagogue. They don't stop having special Jewish graveyards. They don't stop having special Jewish holidays. Why can't we understand that we can have things special to us and still comingle and integrate with others.

There's such a craving to make Egypt white or Asian, people don't just even listen to you. When you explain why would anyone build anything as enduring as the Pyramids in Africa before they would build anything of that nature at home?

Educating a child won't be difficult if you get through to the parent.

Your group has a right and responsibility to preside over your behavior and you have a responsibility to make that behavior in a manner that does not endanger the group.