John Henrik Clarke
John Henrik Clarke (born John Henry Clarke), (January 1, 1915 - July 12, 1998) was an African-American historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies, and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s
He was born John Henry Clarke on January 1, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama, the youngest child of John (a sharecropper) and Willie Ella Clark, a washer woman who died in 1922. With the hopes of earning enough money to buy land rather than sharecrop, his family moved to the closest milltown, Columbus, Georgia.
Counter to his mother's wishes for him to become a farmer, Clarke left Georgia in 1933 by freight train and went to Harlem, New York as part of the Great Migration of rural blacks out of the South to northern cities. There he pursued scholarship and activism. He renamed himself as John Henrik (after rebel Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen) and added an "e" to his surname, spelling it as "Clarke". He also joined the U.S. Army during World War II.