U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Manning Marable has passed away

From the Times:

“Manning Marable, the author of a long-awaited new biography of Malcolm X to be published Monday and director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, died Friday at the age of 60, his wife, Leith Mullings, has confirmed.

“He had been hospitalized with pneumonia last month, and last summer had a double lung transplant meant to relieve him of sarcoidosis, a lung disease from which he had suffered for a quarter century.
A full obituary will appear later”

I read one of his works as an undergrad. He was one of those authors I had to grapple with in order to understand–which is why I have remembered him for so long.

His CV from Columbia:

Manning Marable is the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. 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.
A prolific author, Marable’s works include 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); Freedom: A Photographic History of the African-American Freedom Struggle, which he coedited with Leith Mullings and Sophie Spencer-Wood (Phaidon 2002); and “9/11: Racism in a Time of Terror,” in Souls (Winter 2002).
He received his BA from Earlham and his PhD from University of Maryland. Prior to coming to Columbia, Marable taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Ohio State University, where he was chairman of the Department of Black Studies. He also served as the founding director of the Africana and Hispanic Studies Program at Colgate University.