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Clarke proclaimed his own search for identity to have begun as a child simply trying to understand the world around him. He considered his great grandmother "Mom Mary", the family historian, to have been his first teacher. She told him and his siblings stories about their family, its resistance to slavery.

As a child Clarke's father took their family to Columbus, Georgia. There he went to school for the first time and became the first among his family's nine children to learn to read. As an autodidact, he accomplished that feat "by picking up signs, grocery handbills...and by studying the signboards." Clarke taught the junior class of his Sunday school by the age of ten and read the Bible to old ladies in his community.

Clarke's search for his people began in the Bible, and that search began with questions, such as "why are all the characters -— even those who, like Moses, were born in Africa —- white?" Having read the depiction of Christ "as swarthy and with hair like sheep's wool" he wondered why the church's depiction showed Christ as blond and blue-eyed. As he read more he asked more questions: "Where was the hair like sheep's wool? Where was the swarthy complexion? How did Moses become so white? If he went down to Ethiopia to marry Zeporah, why was Zeporah so white? Who painted the world white?" It was then that his life-long search for self-definition in world history began.

Clarke's best remembrance of his school years were of his first teacher, Evelena Taylor, in Columbus, Georgia. She was the first to teach him to believe in himself by simply stating to him "I believe in you." During his last year of grammar school Clarke "began to receive some of the privileges in the school that generally went to the light-complected youngsters who were called "The Light Brigade." That group consisted of children of professional blacks many of whom had a light complexion. Clarke led the so-called "The Dark Brigade" or poorer...