Marable, Manning

MARABLE, MANNING (1950-2011). A prolific African American scholar, institution-builder, writer and political organizer, Manning Marable made many significant contributions to the Left and especially the Black Left.

Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, he was the son of a distinguished mother, an ordained minister with a PhD. At her urging, he covered the assassination of Martin Luther King. Jr., for the local Black newspaper. It was the beginning of a remarkable career.

Graduating from Earlham College, taking a PhD at the University of Maryland in 1976, Marable had already begun circulating his own syndicated column, “Along the Color Line,” to more than a hundred papers, most notably the surviving Black weekly press across the US, Caribbean, Africa, and India. By the end of the decade, he had become a widely recognized figure in Black radical politics and thought, well known for speaking to popular audiences of many kinds.

By the early 1980s, Marable had become a major figure in the higher circles of African American academic life. He joined Fisk University as a professor of economics and history, then the director of the Race Relations Institute, before agreeing to direct the Africana and Latin American Studies programs at Colgate University. From there, he moved to chair Black Studies at the Ohio State University, onward to the University of Colorado, and finally in 1994 to Columbia University. He remained at Columbia through the rest of his career, creating and directing the Center for Contemporary Black History. He founded the Institute for Research in African-American and Studies and Souls: A critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, an academic publication with a popular tone and many distinguished contributors.

Meanwhile, Marable had taken an active and sometimes leading role in the organized Left. A participant in the early 1970s in efforts to create the National Black Independent Political Party, he joined the New American Movement(NAM) at its founding in 1971 and quickly became a key figure through his speaking and participating in leadership decisions. He played a central role in the negotiations to merge NAM and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) during 1980-1982. With others, he drafted a vision of a multi-racial, feminist-inspired Left considered a major step at the time.

At a conference he organized for Third World Socialists at Fisk University in 1983, he promoted DSA’s new “commissions” on race and ethnicity. These commissions would be central for many socialists to support Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign for the presidency and for DSA to endorse Jackson in his 1988 run. Marable himself was a vice chair of DSA and a member of the National Executive Committee (renamed National Political Committee), where he aimed to provide a strong Black voice and to attract a significantly multiracial membership. He greatly encouraged the creation of a new journal within and around DSA, the Third World Socialists. Until the end of his life, he remained a hugely popular speaker at DSA Youth Section conferences and campus events.

After more than 900 members left the Communist Party 1991 and formed the Committees of Correspondence, Marable embraced the new movement’s emerging Black leadership. He helped draft the declaration of principles for a founding convention, reflecting the need to seek the broadest possible unity within the left and beyond. One of the five co-chairs, he served on the National Coordinating Committee and guided the development of the People of Color committee and provided political guidance on left unity and anti-racism. Marable enthusiastically undertook the organizational tasks of building a new organization.

In 1995, Marable met with other prominent Black activists including Barbara Ransby, Abdul Alkalimat, Bill Fletcher, and Leith Mullings to plan a response to the deterioration of the lives of Black people in the nation and around the world. They were soon joined by some 35 prominent Black activists from diverse left organizations—socialist, communist, radical feminist, revolutionary nationalists—from around the country to organize what became the Black Radical Congress.

The group had not initially planned to form a new political organization but to find ways to encourage coalition building and joint activities among existing groups. At the first conference, in June 1998, with more than 3,000 in attendance, the energy and enthusiasm of the assembled group convinced them to form a united front of Black progressive politics. A self-identified, anti-capitalist perspective, rejecting both the class reductionism among the white left and the growing patriarchal trend in Black U.S. politics, would, they hoped, inform the way forward. The Black Radical Congress continued, through local chapters, to work on a range of issues, from police brutality to incarceration, public education, labor rights and gender justice. The Congress promoted a Black left with the critical inclusion of Black feminist positions within the Black community, Black scholarship, and Black politics. Some leading participants also attended the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Xenophobia sponsored by the United Nations and held in Durban South Africa in 2001. This conference, and the follow up reports from the conference, highlighted the long tradition of incorporating an internationalist perspective within the movements of the Black Left. This work, like the rest of Marable’s efforts, led in part to the current Black Lives Matter movement.

Marable’s scholarship was prolific and influential. His first book, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983, 2015), along with Race, Reform and Rebellion-The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006 (1983, 2007), provided a crucial political and social history of African American struggles while developing a Marxist tradition of scholarship and activism. Let Nobody Turn Us Around (2000, 2005 co-edited with Leith Mullings), traced the history of “transformational” politics in Black political writing from the time of slavery to the present and became one of the most widely used textbooks in Black studies. Marable wrote or edited more than twenty-two books throughout his career and his final work, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (2011) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Marable’s scholarship and publications were superb and widely recognized within academia and were read by activists throughout the world.

Manning Marable Papers, 1967-2012. Finding Aid. Columbia University Libraries Archival Collection.