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.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the resurgence of pride among African Americans due to the rise of African nations and civil rights movements.
John Henrik Clarke's quote reflects on a significant period in history where the rise of African nations, along with the Nation of Islam and civil rights movement in America, instilled a renewed sense of pride and identity in Black Americans. This revitalization followed a time of decline after the influential movement led by Marcus Garvey, emphasizing the importance of these concurrent movements in fostering a collective sense of dignity and empowerment among African Americans.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the significance of the civil rights movement.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
There's a big mistake that people make with history, which is to think that people in the past were just like us, but wearing crinolines. They lived in different worlds.
One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.
To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice
It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle.
Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.
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