Manning Marable Dies

RFH 2010, Cover Stories, Colgate News

Fri, Apr 01, 2011

Manning Marable, the founding director of Colgate's African-American and Hispanic studies program, died Friday. He was 60, and had been a sociology professor at Colgate from 1983 to 1986.

His death comes just as his most recent work, a new biography of Malcom X, was about to be released. Critics praised the 594-page book for what The New York Times called its "new and startling information and insights." The book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is said to counter many of the facts of Malcolm X's controversial ife, including and especially his assassination in 1965.

The book is due to be released Monday by Viking. Read an excerpt.

Marable had long suffered from sarcoidosis, and last year received a double lung transplant.

At the time of his death in a New York City hospital, Marable was the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. According to Columbia's website, he was founding director of African-American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003. Since 2002, he has directed Columbia's Center for Contemporary Black History.

Among the 20 books Marable wrote or edited are:

Beyond Black and White: Race in America's Past, Present and Future (Verso 1995),
The Crisis of Color and Democracy (Common Courage Press 1995), which was awarded the Book of the Year by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights (1996);
The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (Basic Books 2003);
and Freedom: A Photographic History of the African-American Freedom Struggle, which he coedited with Leith Mullings and Sophie Spencer-Wood (Phaidon 2002).

He received his BA from Earlham and his PhD from University of Maryland.

In addition to teaching at Colgate and Columbia, Marable taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Fisk and Ohio State University, where he was chairman of the Department of Black Studies.