Dr. John Henrik Clarke

7-7-2026

In 1969, the Panther Party was influencing Merritt College. Merritt was a two-year college on the Berkeley–Oakland border in Northern California.

The college also had the nation's first Black Studies Department, created in 1964.

In 1969, while living in Berkeley, California, my daughter was born. Her father and I lived on the second floor of an old nineteenth-century house. It had what had once been an upstairs porch that had been enclosed and turned into a room. This became my daughter's room. The house had a small backyard and a basement, which we rarely used. Alec, having quit high school years earlier, was just finishing his GED so he could enter college.

This was a very strange time in my life. I was experiencing racism for the first time and was in a very confused state, not knowing what I would do with my life or how I would live with the racism that surrounded me. Having just had a baby, I actually felt mentally lost and didn't know it.

I loved my baby. Alec loved the baby. We both spent hours with her, experiencing parenthood. For the first time in my life, I was responsible for another human being who was completely dependent on me.

Alec and I supplemented our small income by making large candles in our cellar and selling them on the college campus and on the streets of Berkeley. With that, and Alec's small allowance from his family, we survived.

Around this time, I moved into another old two-story house and rented one of the bedrooms to a Japanese woman who had left her husband in Japan and brought her three-year-old son, Tui, with her.

It was a wonderful old house and it had a calming effect on me. My bedroom had once been an enclosed porch that wrapped around the second floor. It was surrounded by walls of windows, so I lived in sunlight throughout the day. Ivy grew over the windows, and I was constantly pulling it away from the glass. As I did, the tiny feet of the vines remained stuck to the panes.

I loved that house. It was one of the happiest times in my life. My daughter and Tui became fast friends and played together all day whenever we were home. I lived then in a worldly daze of wonder. I was amazingly brave and believed I could take care of myself and that nothing would happen to me. So, I moved through the world that way.

I found work producing journalistic video pieces for the newly emerging cable television stations. My father had been a photographer and filmmaker in his spare time, so I grew up surrounded by cameras and learned from him how to use them. At the time, I had no idea this would become the career I would follow until I retired.

Motherhood had changed me, and I began to feel the need to complete my education. I knew I had to find work, but I also needed someone to care for my daughter. So, I joined the Berkeley women's movement and worked with other women in the community to develop daycare.

Merritt College, a two-year college, was free. The Panther Party had transformed the atmosphere of the college and influenced the curriculum, making it relevant to the people we were and the lives we were living. They brought in remarkable teachers. There were courses in the Psychology of La Raza, African Art, African History, and many others.

Among those teachers was Dr. John Henrik Clarke.

It was there that I met him.

From the moment our eyes met, we both knew that we knew each other. It was as though we had returned to a time when we had belonged to the same tribe, the same neighborhood, the same family.

His lectures were extraordinary. I drank in his words and the images he showed us as though they were coconut water on a scorching, thirsty day.

The classes were unlike anything I had ever experienced. The Psychology of La Raza introduced me to a part of American history I had never been taught. Black Art. African History. No one had ever told me about my African roots. These were only a few among many remarkable courses. My daughter attended the Panther Party daycare center so women could study. It truly was the People's College.

I wrote my papers with love, and one day, near the end of the semester, Dr. Clarke gave us our final assignment. We were to create something from deep within ourselves that related to our African ancestry.

I don't remember whether there were non-Black students in the class. The truth is, I never paid attention to anyone except Dr. Clarke. I cannot remember any of my classmates.

I went to the art supply store and bought a large block of clay. I had no idea what I was going to create, but I wanted it to be tactile. I wanted to be able to feel it.

The clay was rust red and earthy. I played with its softness in my hands and kneaded it as though I were kneading bread. My hands moved by themselves, forming the clay, shaping it, smoothing it, rounding it.

I don't remember deciding what to make.

Then suddenly I realized I was creating my grandmother's head.

I looked at the clay.

It was already there.

Instinctively, my hands had begun creating the head of my grandmother from the memory I carried somewhere deep inside me.

Once I understood what I was making, my hands slipped and slid through the smooth red earth, breathing life into her face—her high cheekbones, her wide eyes, her ears and earlobes with their large tribal ear holes where she wore her special earrings.

I was in a state of spiritual euphoria as I brought this smooth red-brown clay to life. I could hardly believe what had happened, yet somehow, I understood it completely.

I pinched the clay across the top, the sides, and the back to create the soft, tightly coiled African curls she had. Her high cheekbones called out to me, and I remembered sleeping beside her, laying my head against the smooth skin of her full arms.

That was heaven to me.

My grandmother was my heart.

And Dr. John Henrik Clarke brought her back out of my being.

The following morning, I awoke from a dream in which she told me how tired she was. Later that day my mother telephoned to tell me she had died.

She had come to me in my dream to let me know she was leaving.

I wept.

Dr. John Henrik Clarke, the professor who taught me African Art, was also the man who gently took me by the hand and placed me back into the arms of my ancestors.

I can never forget him.

When I showed him the sculpture, he was astonished. But he understood what I had experienced.

He silently wept with me.