John Henrik Clarke Quotes

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

My black brothers and sisters - of all religious beliefs, or of no religious beliefs - we all have in common the greatest binding tie we could have. We are all black people!

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

I think we're all brothers - that's the truth. But the press gave us the name black Muslims to cut us off from the others.

I am a black man inside and outside and you are white men on the outside, but inside, you are Africans like me.

You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can't hate Africa and not hate yourself.

Africa's not a color - it's a place.

Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to link us today.

The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

And so, whether they came here on the Mayflower, on a slave ship, or on an airplane from Havana, we are all descendants of the men and women who built here the nation that saved the world.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

Like any group that has endured much, African Americans have created a strong and mutually reinforcing sense of group identity. That's not a bad thing in and of itself.

Ritual is important to us as human beings. It ties us to our traditions and our histories.

It is something singular that the colored race—those in reality most interested in the future destinies of Africa—should be so lightly affected by the evidences continually being presented in favor of colonization

I stand by 'Roots' as symbol of the fate of my people.

I still enjoy a lot of support from the black community.

The one thing that I'm always gonna promote is, 'Don't look at a fellow black man as an enemy.' And it's hard. It's really hard, though, when you're coming up. It's something that you have to teach yourself and learn.

My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.

While I might not have a specific experience that is fully American, there is still a knowledge, something that I logically understand as a black woman and a black woman who is existing in America and a black woman who is in the diaspora that are just known quantities that I think anyone can relate to who is black.

I don't consider myself just a black man. I consider myself a brotha. I love my people.

The population of African people in the United States is far in excess of six small European nations. Where we are going? We have to go back as best we can to where slavery and colonialism took us from. And they took us from a concept of nation management and nation maintenance. We have been so long away from home we unfortunately have forgotten how we ruled states before the foreigners got there.

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again, — such are the essential conditions for the making of a people.

We are here to work side-by-side with this "black" man in trying to bring liberation to all our people!

I'm a black man that is proud to be black, and I want to help the black community, but I love all mankind.