Manning Marable papers, 1967-2012

William Manning Marable (May 13, 1950-April 1, 2011) was a leading theorist and historian of socioeconomic and racial inequality. Born May 13, 1950 in Dayton, Ohio, Marable was the son of educators. Active in school groups and student movements, Marable cultivated his love of history and writing early. He went on to attend Earlham College (1971), and received a master's degree (1972) and PhD (1976) in history from the University of Wisconsin and University of Maryland, respectively.

Following his studies, Marable served on the faculty of Tuskegee Institute; University of San Francisco; Cornell University; Fisk University; Colgate University, where he was the founding director of the Africana and Hispanic studies program; Purdue University; Ohio State University as chair of the Department of Black Studies; and University of Colorado, Boulder, where Marable served as co-chair of Critical Studies of the Americas.

Marable strongly believed that institution building was central to maintaining and sustaining black studies, which he understood to be an alternative to the traditional hegemonic history. In 1993, he became the Founding Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS). During his tenure (1993-2003), the Institute launched academic programs for undergraduate and graduate students centered on teaching the African American freedom struggle. As a teacher and mentor, Marable was devoted to fostering achievement and cultivating student talent—placing students in leadership roles on institutional projects.

He was equally making knowledge available to the broader community. He was the founding editor of Souls, a journal named for W.E.B. DuBois' seminal work, which became a leading journal for African American studies and black political thought. Marable also founded the Columbia Center for Contemporary Black History (2002-2011), an interdisciplinary research center designed to promote the critical study of black politics, history, and culture. Marable launched several initiatives, including the Amistad Digital Resource Project, the Malcolm X Project, and the Africana Criminal Justice Project, all of which shared a commitment to social justice, equitable access, and public education.

Although Marable was known for writing his many manuscripts freehand—filling sheets upon sheets of yellow loose leaf with his impeccable script—he was in fact a man well ahead of his time with respect to digital humanities. Early on in his tenure at Columbia University, Marable piloted what would be his first of several digital humanities projects, launching a multimedia project that reexamined Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk.

His commitment to the idea that all knowledge should be public motivated him to write and produce a free column that examined black politics, culture, and current events for nearly thirty years. The column, "From the Grassroots" (later "Along the Color Line), was syndicated in over 320 publications across the globe.

Throughout his career, Marable acted on his belief that theory and practice were inseparable and was active in a broad array of political organizations and an advisor to many more. These included the Institute for the Black World, the Democratic Socialists of America DSA), the National Black Political Assembly (NBPA), the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP) and the Committees of Correspondence. In 1998, along with his wife, Leith Mullings, he was one of the co-founders of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).

Influenced by black radical thinkers from DuBois to CLR James to Walter Rodney, Marable's worked from an intellectual tradition that was anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist. These themes were all central to his influential How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983). The third edition, with a Foreward from his wife, Leith Mullings, underscoring its relevance to the current period, was published in 2015, which recently entered its third edition—a testament to its enduring intellectual significance. His written work demonstrated a profound and unique commitment and evolution as a writer, scholar, thinker and political activist. The author of over 30 manuscripts, Marable's other work includes Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982 (1984); Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism (1996); Let Nobody Turn Us Around (with Leith Mullings, 2000); Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle (with Leith Mullings, 2002); and Living Black History: How Reimagining the African American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future (2006).

His final book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, was the culmination of a nearly twenty-year investigation of Malcolm X. The acclaimed biography was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in History and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Documentation of that work is in catalogued in the Malcolm X Project collection, found here (hyperlink). Marable suffered from sarcoidosis for many years, and underwent a double lung transplant in July 2010. He died of complications from pneumonia on April 1, 2011.