“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;”>When Manning Marable died Friday, April 1, 2011 in New York at the age of 60, Black America lost an important advocate, chronicler, scholar and intellectual.
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“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>“He was the embodiment of the scholar/activist,” said Adrienne D. Davis, vice provost and professor of law at Washington University
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“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>“He was a
deep thinker
who had a great love for his people,” said Donald M. Suggs, who for
many years published Marable’s column in
“mso-bidi-font-style: normal;”>The St. Louis American
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>“He was a brilliant intellectual and a very inventive thinker, very principled and uncompromising,” said poet Eugene B. Redmond, professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville.
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>“Marable was a major figure in Africana Studies and a prominent personality in leftist academic circles,” said Gerald Early, professor and director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.
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“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>“He created a new group of journalists who made positive change in the communities, in neighborhoods, schools, boards and community affairs,” said
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>Bernie Hayes, author, activist and radio personality.
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>In fact, Marable’s career as a writer started as a youth journalist. Born May 13, 1950 in Dayton, Ohio, he went South to cover the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. as a journalist when he was still in his teens.
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>He remained a committed political activist and organizer as he developed his academic credentials, earning a doctorate in history from the University of Maryland in 1976 and joining the faculty at Columbia University in 1993 after several previous appointments, including at Cornell University.
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I first met Manning Marable back in the late 1970s or the very early 1980s while I was still a graduate student at Cornell University,” Gerald Early said.
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>“He was a professor in the Africana Studies program there, and even then his presence was striking with his ‘Frederick Douglass’ look. He struck me immediately as a highly prolific scholar and polemicist, and he was clearly devoted to the idea of being an activist. I liked his seriousness of purpose and his demeanor of the proud black intellectual.”
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>Eugene B. Redmond crossed paths with Marable many times over the course of three decades at various public forums. He remembered in particular one “memorable encounter” in October 1980 at California State University – Sacramento, where Redmond was poet in residence and Marable attended a working conference to define a plan for a black political party.
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I had the honor of introducing him,” Redmond remembered.
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I mentioned he was the new kid on the block. We are talking almost 30 years ago when he would have been 30 or so. I said he was like a stepchild of the pioneers of the black arts and black power movements – a restless one, a complex one, a sometimes difficult one for people who wanted to soft-shoe the issues.”
“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>“In his first book, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, published in 1983, Dr. Marable gave a devastating economic critique of racial injustice, showing how capitalism systematically and inevitably produces racial inequalities,” Adrienne D. Davis said
“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>Marable adapted this title from the Marxist classic of African history,
“mso-bidi-font-style: normal;”>How Europe Underdeveloped Africa car-bombed in 1980 while organizing workers in his home country. Early compared Marable to Rodney and to W. E. B. DuBois, a common comparison.
“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>“Dr. Marable, like Angela Davis, Paul Robeson, Pauli Murray and W. E. B. DuBois, had the courage to embrace Marxist perspectives on the exploitation of labor in a nation that has systematically persecuted those who align themselves with that view,” Davis said.
“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>Marable wrote an important book about DuBois, “mso-bidi-font-style: normal;”>
“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana; color: black; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;”> W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat “font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>(1986). However, the final decades of his life primarily were spent working on a monumental new biography of Malcolm X that was scheduled for publication just days after his death from complications stemming from pneumonia.
“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>“A fitting tribute to honor Dr. Marable and his legacy as a scholar/activist might be to organize reading circles to buy, or check out from the library his final study of black America,” Davis said of this final work, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.
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“font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>“Unfortunately, he and ideas never got the attention they merited when he lived,” said Donald M. Suggs.
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>“As a people with extraordinary challenges we have paid too little attention to our thinkers. Now that he has passed away, we need to make use of the valuable work he left behind.”
“font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 125%; font-family: Verdana;”>Early noted, “I believe his work will endure and that his career will be an inspiration to many coming after him.”
