Manning Marable: A Scholar and an Activist
APRIL 4, 2011 TAGS:
As an 18 year-old Manning Marable attended the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. The local black newspapers in his Ohio town piggybacked on his journey to Atlanta, enlisting Marable as their correspondent. In Marable’s 1996 seminal Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism, he reflected on the impact of that event:
"With Martin's death, my childhood abruptly ended. My understanding of political change began a trajectory from reform to radicalism."
Marable’s life as a Civil Rights scholar, chronicler and activist stands astride the lives of two of the movement’s towering icons. Martin Luther King’s death was his political awakening and Malcolm X’s life, which he arduously researched in a forthcoming biography, was the final contribution of Marable's remarkable career. Marable died on Friday, April 1 at 60.
Penguin books plans to release Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention today.
The biography promises to be a singular achievement. According to the Los Angeles Times:
The book is based on exhaustive research, including thousands of pages of FBI files and records from the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department. Marable also conducted interviews with the slain civil rights leader's confidants and security team, as well as witnesses to his assassination.
Moreover, the examination of the late leader’s life further articulates the transformations of Malcolm’s philosophy of activism. The dynamic equilibrium between scholarship and activism is also Marable’s lasting legacy in the fields of social justice research, human rights and black history.
Writing in The Nation, Harvard professor Timothy Patrick McCarthy writes of the institution that his former mentor built while a professor at Columbia:
At the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, his “baby” at Columbia, we became part of a vibrant community of scholar-activists who took Marx’s challenge—to transform rather than merely understand and interpret the world—very seriously. But like Du Bois before him, Manning’s vision also drew deeply, even primarily, from the intellectual and political wellsprings of the black radical tradition. His Institute was a Black space and a multicultural one, at once democratic and radical, scholarly and activist, critical and welcoming, privileged and public—and these were never contradictions.
Russell Rickford, another former student, compares Marable to W.E.B. DuBois in The Root:
It is appropriate that a remembrance of Marable invoke Du Bois' vision; Marable was himself something of an encyclopedia Africana. His epic knowledge of the black Diaspora never failed to stun those who heard him lecture, whether at a podium during one of the frequent appearances to which he too readily consented, or during everyday conversations. Marable offered disquisitions on race, culture and politics that expertly illuminated the mechanisms of injustice and left you burning with indignation, glowing with inspiration and ready to take to the streets -- or hustle to your computer.
The means of mass activism may be changing, but Marable’s work confirms that there are few shortcuts on the road to identity, self-expression and self-knowledge. Studied individuals and institutions, like Marable and the institute at Columbia, continue to lead the way.
Marable’s Malcolm X biography becomes the second posthumous new release in the world of publishing. David Foster Wallace’s incomplete final novel, The Pale King, is available online.
(Image Credit: David Shankbone, via WikiCommons)
"With Martin's death, my childhood abruptly ended. My understanding of political change began a trajectory from reform to radicalism."Marable’s life as a Civil Rights scholar, chronicler and activist stands astride the lives of two of the movement’s towering icons. Martin Luther King’s death was his political awakening and Malcolm X’s life, which he arduously researched in a forthcoming biography, was the final contribution of Marable's remarkable career. Marable died on Friday, April 1 at 60.
Penguin books plans to release Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention today.
The biography promises to be a singular achievement. According to the Los Angeles Times:
The book is based on exhaustive research, including thousands of pages of FBI files and records from the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department. Marable also conducted interviews with the slain civil rights leader's confidants and security team, as well as witnesses to his assassination.
Moreover, the examination of the late leader’s life further articulates the transformations of Malcolm’s philosophy of activism. The dynamic equilibrium between scholarship and activism is also Marable’s lasting legacy in the fields of social justice research, human rights and black history.
Writing in The Nation, Harvard professor Timothy Patrick McCarthy writes of the institution that his former mentor built while a professor at Columbia:
At the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, his “baby” at Columbia, we became part of a vibrant community of scholar-activists who took Marx’s challenge—to transform rather than merely understand and interpret the world—very seriously. But like Du Bois before him, Manning’s vision also drew deeply, even primarily, from the intellectual and political wellsprings of the black radical tradition. His Institute was a Black space and a multicultural one, at once democratic and radical, scholarly and activist, critical and welcoming, privileged and public—and these were never contradictions.
Russell Rickford, another former student, compares Marable to W.E.B. DuBois in The Root:
It is appropriate that a remembrance of Marable invoke Du Bois' vision; Marable was himself something of an encyclopedia Africana. His epic knowledge of the black Diaspora never failed to stun those who heard him lecture, whether at a podium during one of the frequent appearances to which he too readily consented, or during everyday conversations. Marable offered disquisitions on race, culture and politics that expertly illuminated the mechanisms of injustice and left you burning with indignation, glowing with inspiration and ready to take to the streets -- or hustle to your computer.
The means of mass activism may be changing, but Marable’s work confirms that there are few shortcuts on the road to identity, self-expression and self-knowledge. Studied individuals and institutions, like Marable and the institute at Columbia, continue to lead the way.
Marable’s Malcolm X biography becomes the second posthumous new release in the world of publishing. David Foster Wallace’s incomplete final novel, The Pale King, is available online.
(Image Credit: David Shankbone, via WikiCommons)
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