'A compass on the map of human geography'

 

“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

 

Born a Georgia sharecropper’s son on this date in 1915, Clarke was told in 3^rd grade that he should be a writer, and it became a goal he pursued from that point forward.  Ultimately, he would write six scholarly books and hundreds of essays and short stories before his death in 1998.

 

A leading force in the Harlem Writers' Workshop during the 1930s, Clarke served in World War II before returning to writing and then teaching.  He co-founded Harlem Quarterly magazine and taught at Cornell and Columbia Universities before spending several years teaching at major universities in Africa.  After returning to the States, he edited several anthologies by African American writers and of his own short stories.

      

A champion for people to seek out and write about their roots, he noted, “A people's relationship to their heritage is literally the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.”