Dr. Clarke
Speaks:
"I was born
from very poor landless peasants on January 1, 1915. They were
sharecroppers in the backwoods of Union Springs, Alabama. My father
had a dream that one day he wanted to own land. He wanted to leave
this land to his son. He wanted to be an independent farmer. A storm
that wrecked our house gave him the opportunity to move his family to
a mill city called Columbus, Georgia. He worked in the mills and the
brickyards, hoping to eventually earn the kind of money he could use
to buy independent land. Of course, he never did. But thanks to a ten
cents a week policy, the only free land he ever knew was the grave we
buried him in. That was paid for, free and clear.
"My
background would normally be looked at by both black and white
sociologists as the one kind of background that would not shape me to
be anything of consequence. My early orientation to history came from
my great grandmother. We called her Mom Mary. She had witnessed the
last slaves who arrived directly from Africa. She spoke of them and
their inability to learn the English language immediately. She told
me the story of the trials and tribulations of her family, our
family, and of her husband who was sold to a slave-breeding farm in
Virginia.
"After
emancipation, she went into Virginia, spending three years trying to
find him. She never found him, of course. She was the mother of my
grand aunt, who was a midwife of my father's father.
"Nothing
really shaped me to be a teacher of history in that immediate
background, except that I learned to read early. I use to pick up the
letters from the Post Office. I learned responsibility and was
respected, and somewhat rewarded for shouldering responsibility at an
early age. When we moved to the city, one of the uncles used to give
me five cents a week in tribute to my industry in helping my mother,
and all kinds of things of this nature.
"What set me in motion
was when I learned to teach the junior class in Sunday school, and
couldn't find the image of my own people in the Bible. They were
nowhere to be found in the Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect
that something had gone wrong in history. I see Moses going down to
Ethiopia, where he marries Zipporah, Moses' wife, and she turns
white. I see people going to the land of Kush, which is the
present-day Sudan, and they got white. I see people going to Punt,
which is present-day Somalia, and they got white. What are all these
white people doing in Afrika? There were no Africans in Afrika, in
the Sunday school lesson.
"My great
grandmother kept telling me that everything in the Bible was the
truth, and it was not to be questioned. That gave me a great dilemma,
because I loved her almost to the point of making a deity out of her.
I didn't want to be in conflict with her, but I was running into a
conflict. I couldn't find black people in the land of black people.
So, I began to search.
"One day
while doing chores at a high school, there was a recitalist, and this
recitalist had a book called The New Negro. I would keep his books
and his coat because Spencer High School was so new they didn't have
a coatroom. He was reciting to raise some funds for a curtain for the
stage. They didn't have a curtain. So, I was holding his books. While
doing my chore, I read an essay called, "The Negro Digs Up His
Past." That was a key moment in my life. I made up my mind that
we did have a history For the first time, I read something on the
ancient history of African people. I can't tell you how important
that was to me.
"When I
think about my people immediately after slavery, I often compare our
mental state to now. We were better than we are now -- resisting
better, believing more in ourselves than we are right now. Copping
out less on ourselves than we are right now. Immediately after
slavery, we began to build institutions, political parties, and
businesses faster than we are doing right now. We need to study that
period. We need to read W. E. B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction again.
We need to read his essay on the Freedman's Bureau again. There’s a
whole lot of things we need to reconsider.
"We need to
reconsider the 19th Century black man and woman, who were tall in
comparison to what we are right now. They made fewer excuses. They
had more hardships, and they faced them better. They had something we
don't have, they had fewer distractions: no television, no radio.
They had their work, and the church was the main outlet. Spiritually,
they held themselves together. Culturally, they held themselves
together.
"The church
was also the school. The church was the recreation center. The church
was the place where you would go to look for a lady to court that
might be your wife. The church was the center of the being of a
people. The church was not a weekend thing. The church was an
everyday thing.
"Our forced
migration into this country helped to make this country what it is.
We have a claim that's outstanding. That’s going to have to be
satisfied. We’ve contributed to the culture and to the direction of
this country. We live in an American society that's now dying, and we
can bring it alive, if we think it's worth being brought alive.
"With all
of our faults and all the things that's crippling our development, we
are a nation within a nation, looking for a nationality. Once we find
that nationality, our relationship to Afrika, we will join others in
marshaling our true strength, our peopleness, and our nationness once
again. We’ll stop answering to the term "minority."We
will stop acting like a minority. We will stop feeling like a
minority. We will know then, that we are world people.
"We must
stop killing ourselves about belonging to mother countries not of our
making. Languages not of our making. Stop worshiping gods not of our
choosing, and realize that wherever we are on the face of the earth,
we are an African people. No matter where our bodies are, our
heartbeat, our future, our political being is in Afrika. We are an
African people wherever we are on the face of the earth. We have to
learn how to relax about being an African people. How to use it as a
source of strength, not as a source of retreat or regret. We must
wear it like a badge of honor, and contribute to it as though it was
a new world religious order, which indeed is what it can be.
"As for my
library, 10,000 volumes have already been given to the Woodruff
Library Center at Clark Atlanta University, in Atlanta, Georgia, and
some other libraries. In the event of my passing, all of the books
that are not in the Woodruff Center, all of the African and African
American, all of the relevant books, will be sent there. Where the
Woodruff Library has duplicates, those books will go to the Africana
Studies Center Library at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. My
children's books will go to Public School (PS) 121 at 140th Street
and Eighth Avenue, in Harlem.
"I just
hope the best use will be made of them, in as much as I have traveled
over large portions of the world. I’ve collected books from
different places, libraries and little bookstores in little known
countries. I have books that cannot be bought again because they were
published in like 500 editions, and when that edition was sold out,
neither the publisher nor the author had enough money to get another
edition out.
"I am preparing the audio and video tapes
to be sent, first and foremost, to the audio and video division of
the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and
History, in Atlanta. Some are already gone. A duplicate copy of those
tapes will go to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
in Harlem."Maybe one day there will be books of my papers
published. That will be something that will be thought of later. I am
limited in preparing for immortality. I think that my work is so
unfinished, and I am so unready to leave. It is something I try not
to let dwell on my mind too much. Inevitably, I know that everyone
has an end, but I haven't planned mine as much as some people think I
should.
"Ten, twenty-five, a hundred years from now, if
African historians feel obliged to write about me, I hope they can
say that he did the best he could to tell the truth. When he
discovered that he was wrong, he corrected himself. He was committed
to liberation, uplifting of his own people, and there's no evidence
that he ever turned on his own advocacy of freedom and independence,
or betrayed any aspects of that long freedom struggle.
"In
regards to our precious young people, they are really the seeds of
tomorrow's crop, and our hope for immortality rests with them. They
owe it to themselves, and to us, to pick out the finest things among
us as examples, follow these examples and improve upon them. They are
the makers of tomorrow. We changed the world once. We’ll change it
again."
;)
;)
