Starting in January 2023, Africa400 is now renamed Africa 500 to more accurately reflect the more than 500 years of the Ma’afa, the Great Disaster, the enslavement of Afrikan People in Europe, the Americas and the so-called Middle East.

The Wednesday, January 4 edition of Africa 500 features a speech by Pan-Afrikan Ancestor Dr, John Henrik Clarke, one of the giants of Pan-Afrikanism, Black Nationalism and Afrikan and Afrikan-American history.

The Web site of the Board for the Education of People of African Ancestry (https://bepaa.wordpress.com/about-2/), “an institution housed at the John Henrik Clarke House dedicated to advancing the culture, principles and education of people of African Ancestry”, founded in 1992 by a group of educators, clergy, historians and activists “to define, monitor, formulate and implement policies and practices affecting the education of students of African Ancestry in both public and private educational systems.”  BEPAA is located at the Dr. John Henrik Clarke House at 286 Convent Avenue in New York.  The Web site includes a biography of Dr. Clarke, as well as an interview, Dr. Clarke in his Own Words: Education at the Crossroads, as well as a video, “Education”, the Highest Form of Struggle, at https://bepaa.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/dr-clarke-in-his-own-words-african-education-at-the-crossroads-by-john-henrik-clarke/.

This is what the Web site Black Past (https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/clarke-john-henrik-1915-1998/) wrote in its article about Dr. John Henrik Clarke:

John Henrik Clarke, historian, black nationalist, and Pan-Africanist, was a pioneer in the formation of Africana studies in the United States.  Principally a self-trained historian, Clarke dedicated his life to correcting what he argued was the prevailing view that people of Africa and of African descent had no history worthy of study.  Over the span of his career Clarke became one of the most respected historians of African and African American history.

Clarke was born on New Year’s Day, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama.  He described his father as a “brooding, landless sharecropper,” who struggled to earn enough money to purchase his own farm, and his mother as a domestic.  Clarke’s mother Willie Ella (Mays) Clarke died in 1922, when he was about seven years old.

In 1932 Clarke left the South at age eighteen and he traveled by boxcar to Chicago, Illinois.  He then migrated to New York City, New York where he came under the tutelage of noted scholar Arthur A. Schomburg.  While in New York City’s Harlem, Clarke undertook the study of Africa, studying its history while working full time.

In 1949 the New School for Social Research asked Clarke to teach courses in a newly created African Studies Center.  Nineteen years later Clarke founded the African Heritage Studies Association in 1968, and was principally responsible for the creation of the Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at Hunter College in New York City.  He later lectured at Cornell University as a distinguished visiting Professor of African history.

Clarke’s numerous works include A New Approach to African History (1967), African People in World History (1993), and The Boy Who Painted Jesus Black (1975).  He died in New York City in 1998.

The entire January 4 show is devoted to one of his speeches, often referred to as “The Illusion of Inclusion”.  Listen to it here:

The video of his speech can be seen on YouTube at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ivlXwXGCoDc

Africa 500 airs every Wednesday at 3:00 PM (Eastern Time, United States) on HandRadio, https://handradio.org.  For more information on the show and links to more information, click here.  After the show airs, it can be listened to again in an updated version of the post and on our Audio-Visual Media Page.