Manning
Marable, a founding Vice-Chair of DSA, passed away Friday, April 1, 2011, from
complications of pneumonia. He had suffered from the degenerative disease
sarcoidosis for 25 years, and last year had undergone a double lung transplant.
The death of our comrade Manning is a great loss for the broad left in our
country.
Manning
played a major role in the merger
of our predecessor organizations, NAM and DSOC, into DSA. He was both a Vice
Chair and a member of the National Executive Committee (later the NPC). For the
first years of DSA he brought together a significant group of activists of
color around his publication "Third World Socialist", the publication
of the DSA Anti-Racism, African-American, and Latino commissions. He put a lot
of hard work into getting the various commissions off the ground, and hosted
two DSA-related conferences of over 100 activists and academics of color in the
mid-1980s.
For various personal and political reasons, including some frustration
that DSA's anti-racist work did not grow significantly stronger over time,
Manning shifted some of his political activism to the Committees of
Correspondence. Even so, he remained a warm and good friend of DSA; and an
especially strong friend of the Youth Section (now YDS), speaking often at its
summer and winter conferences.
Manning accomplished a tremendous amount in
his 60 years, both politically and intellectually, and was that rare academic
who never stopped being an active, political person. His work remains a major
part of our heritage.
In the
1990,s Manning Marable was one of the five leading African-American activist to
host a series of national discussions on organizing a movement of the Black
Left. Out of the discussions emerged the National Black Radical Congress (BRC),
founded on June 19, 1998. Manning played a critical role in the formation
and implementation of the Black Radical Congress (BRC), providing vision and
leadership throughout the process.
