John Henrik Clarke is best known as the scholar who made Africana studies prominent in academia in the late 1960s. Arriving in Harlem at the age of 18 in 1933, Clarke developed as a writer and lecturer during the Great Depression years, becoming a part of the movement we now understand as the Harlem Renaissance. Clarke was co-founder of the Harlem Quarterly (1949–51), book review editor of the Negro History Bulletin (1948–52), associate editor of the magazine, Freedomways, and a feature writer for the Black-owned Pittsburgh Courier. Clarke taught at the New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1958. Traveling in West Africa in 1958–59, he met Kwame Nkrumah, whom he had mentored as a student in the US, and was offered a job working as a journalist for the Ghana Evening News. He also lectured at the University of Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, including in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan. His greatest period of influence resides in the 1960’s where he was a prominent intellectual during the Black Power Movement, advocating studies on the African-American experience and the place of Africans in world history. He challenged the views of academic historians and helped shift the way African history was studied and taught.
enemies too.