A tribute to Manning Marable

The Great Wells of Manning Marable 

Melissa Harris-Perry

April 3, 2011

We have suffered a great loss in the passing of
Professor Manning Marable. As my Nation colleague John
Nichols wrote yesterday [1], the coming weeks will be
filled with tributes to Manning's life and work. He
was, as John says, "one of America's truest public
intellectuals."

Manning was an unflinching and breathtakingly prolific
scholar whose commitments to racial, economic, gender,
and international justice were unparalleled. In decades
of weekly columns, hundreds of academic journal
articles and a dozen books, Manning has already written
his own legacy. But despite the fact that we all have
"Manning Marable shelves" in our personal libraries,
there are two generations of African-American scholars
who will remember him as much for the mentor he was to
us as for the research legacy he leaves.

It is still a surprisingly lonely endeavor to be an
African-American academic pursuing research on black
life. Despite the outward appearance of successful
careers, many black social scientists, historians and
humanists wage a daily battle for relevance and respect
in our departments and on our campuses. The fight
begins in graduate school and does not seem to abate
even after we have published articles, written books,
achieved tenure or garnered professional praise.

In Memoriam - Manning Marable

Manning Marable, African-American Studies Scholar, Has Died at 60

By LARRY ROHTER,NYT.

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.
Manning Marable and the efforts of this blog.
See an obituary here. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/books/malcolm-x-biographer-dies-on-eve-of-publication-of-redefining-work.html

        Dr. Manning Marable played a significant role in the merger of DSOC and NAM, bringing several NAM strengths into the new organization. The points of unity between NAM and DSOC were carefully drafted to reflect the strengths of each organization.   In the summer of 1983 Manning  organized a conference of Third World Socialists at Fisk University, bringing together a diverse group of  left academics and activists. The list of participants was impressive.

            New Commissions for DSA, a Latino Commission, an African American Commission and an Anti Racism Commission were developed at this conference. These commissions came together in publishing Our Struggle/Nuestra Lucha, the newsletter of these commissions from 1983 until 2004.

            Dr. Marable was both a Vice Chair and a member of the National Executive  Committee ( later the NPC)  where he provided a strong voice for the  work of bringing a significantly multiracial membership to the organization.   In the Vol.1, N.1, of Our Struggle we report that the new NEC Unanimously voted to establish quotas for representatives of each ethnic/cultural group on the NEC an idea that was developed at the Fisk conference.

            One of Manning’s major contributions  within DSA was to develop a new journal, Third World Socialist, a journal for the diverse left movements of the time.  TWS was published  by the National and Racial Minorities Coordinating Committee of DSA, chaired by Manning and supported by Michael Harrington  and Leo Casey and Gerry Hudson (among others) .  The first issue had an  essay by Manning – Run Jesse Run, and the second issue an essay by Manning, The Jackson Campaign ( of 1983-1984) A Critical Assessment.  These essays would later appear in his popular weekly columns in African American newspapers around the nation.  A young scholar Cornel West was at the Fisk meeting and  has an essay in this journal on The Black Church and Socialists Politics. There were two issues of this journal.   For decades Manning wrote columns in the African American press with the by- line Along the Color Line and he spoke at hundreds of college campuses.   He used this popularly written column to promote a democratic socialist perspective.
Dr. Marable was also a major voice in the African American struggle for justice.  Local friends  Faye Kennedy and Carl Pinkston described his role as:

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. Manning wrote the draft Freedom Agenda for the Black Radical Congress modeled after the Black Panther Party ten-point platform.

Manning used writings and lectures to address racism, sexism and classism in US; and specific in the Black community.  Manning’s powerful voice was heard clearly in such noted publications and books as: How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983), Black Liberation in Conservative America (1997) and The Great Wells of Democracy (2003), and in a political column, "Along the Color Line," which was syndicated in more than 100 newspapers. In every major Black newspapers, Manning political column “Along the Color Line” serve as a political beacon during the 80’s and 90’s. Manning life long scholarship and activism challenged the Left to address anti-racism work. Most importantly, Manning challenge the Black community to understand the roles of class and sexism; and how its impact communities. Lastly, Manning stood on the side of the Black working class. 

To read some of the essays, see- Race, Reform and Rebellion; The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006.   First published in 1984.  Third Edition, 2007.

And, Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson,  (1985)

And, Historical Studies in Race, Class Consciousness and Revolution.  (1981)

Joe, in his tribute, mentions one of the major works, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America.  1983.

More recently, he edited. Let Nobody Turn Us Around; Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal.  2000.

Manning co-authored a chapter on race in the first edition of my work,

Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. (1994)

Manning was the co-author of a chapter in the first edition  in my book, Choosing Democracy, a practical guide to multicultural education.
Duane Campbell

Barack Obama's problem --And ours

Barack Obama's Problem -- And Ours
Along the Color Line

By Dr. Manning Marable, PhD,
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
;

["Along The Color Line", written by Manning Marable,
PhD and distributed by.BlackCommentator.com, is a
public educational and information service dedicated
to fostering political dialogue and discussion,
inspired by the great tradition for political event
columns written by W. E. B. Du Bois nearly a century
ago. Re-prints are permitted by any Black-owned or
Black-oriented publications (print or electronic)
without charge as long as they are printed in their
entirety including this paragraph and, for
electronic media, a link to
http://www.BlackCommentator.com.]

Several years ago, I was walking home to my Manhattan
apartment from Columbia University, just having
delivered a lecture on New York State's notorious
"Rockefeller Drug Laws." The state's mandatory-minimum
sentencing laws had thrown tens of thousands of
nonviolent drug offenders into state prisons with
violent convicts. In my lecture I had called for more
generous prisoner reentry programs, the restoration of
felons' voting rights, increased educational programs
inside prisons, and a restoration of judges' sentencing
authority.

A white administrator from another local university, a
woman, who I had always judged to be fairly conservative
and probably a Republican, had attended my lecture and
was walking along with me to go to the subway. She told
me that my lecture about the "prison industrial complex"
had been a real "eye opener." The fact that two million
Americans were imprisoned, she expressed, was a "real
scandal."

Then this college administrator blurted out, in a
hurried manner, "You know, my son is also in prison . a
victim of the drug laws."

In a split second, I had to make a hard decision:
whether to engage this white conservative administrator
in a serious conversation about America's gulags and
political economy of mass incarceration that had
collaterally ensnared her son, or to pretend that I had
not heard her last sentence, and to continue our
conversation as if she had said nothing at all. Perhaps
this is a sign of generational weakness on my part, but
the overwhelming feeling I had at that precise moment
was that, one day, the white administrator would deeply
regret revealing such an intimate secret with a black
person. I might tell the entire world about it. Instead
of proceeding on the basis of mutual trust and common
ground, transcending the boundaries of color, it would
be better to ignore what was said in haste.

All of this occurred to me in the span of one heartbeat.
I decided to say nothing. Two seconds later, I could
visually detect the signs of relief on the woman's face.
African Americans have survived in the United States for
over four hundred years because, at least up to the most
recent generation of black people, we have made it our
business to study white Americans generally, and
especially those who exercise power. This explains why
so many African Americans, at the very core of their
being, express fears that millions of white Americans
will be unable to cast ballots for Obama for president
solely due to his racial identity. Of course, the
majority of them would deny this, even to themselves.

Among the remaining Democratic presidential candidates,
former Senator John Edwards (albeit with a "suspended"
campaign) has been consistently the most progressive on
most policy issues, in my view. On issues such as health
care and poverty, Edwards has been clearly to the left
of both Obama and Hillary Clinton. But since Edwards
probably cannot win the Democratic nomination the real
choice is between Clinton and Obama.

We've all heard the arguments explaining why Obama's
"not qualified" to be president. Chief among them is
that he "doesn't have enough experience in government."
As a historian, I think it may be instructive to observe
that three of the twentieth century's most influential
presidents had shorter careers in electoral politics
than Obama. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, served as
New York's governor for only two years, and was William
McKinley's Vice President for barely six months. Woodrow
Wilson served as New Jersey's governor for only two
years before being elected president. And Franklin D.
Roosevelt, our only four-term president, had served in
Albany as New York's governor for four years. None of
these leaders was ever elected to Congress.

Obama's seven years in the Illinois State Senate,
according to the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, show
that "he scored significant achievements there: a law to
videotape police interrogations in capital cases; an
earned income tax credit to fight poverty; an expansion
of early childhood education." To be perfectly honest,
there are some public policy issues where I sharply
disagree with Obama, such as health care. Obama's
approach is not to use "mandates" to force millions of
healthy twenty-somethings into the national health
insurance pool. He claims that you won't need mandates,
just lower the price of private health insurance and
young adults will buy it on their own. Obama's children
are still small, so maybe he can be excused for such an
irrational argument. Obama's reluctance to embrace
health mandates is about his desire to appeal to
"centrists" and moderate Republicans.

Not getting email from BC?

That brings us back to Barack's unspoken problem: white
denial and voter flight. It's instructive to remember
what happened to David Dinkins, the first (and still
only) African American elected mayor of New York City.
According to Andrew Kohul, the current president of the
Pew Research Center, the Gallup organization's polling
research on New York City's voters in 1989 indicated
that Dinkins would defeat his Republican opponent,
Rudolph Giuliani, by 15 percent. Instead, Dinkins only
narrowly won by 2 percent. Kohul, who worked as a Gallup
pollster in that election, concluded that "poorer, less
well-educated [white] voters were less likely to answer
our questions;" so the poll didn't have the opportunity
to factor in their views. As Kohul admits, "Here's the
problem - these whites who do not respond to surveys
tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than
respondents who do the interviews."

So I return to the white college administrator whose son
is in prison on drug charges. I made a mistake. People
of color must break through the mental racial barricades
that divide America into parallel racial universes. We
need to mobilize and support the election of Barack
Obama not only because he is progressive and fully
qualified to be president, but also because only his
campaign can force all Americans to overcome the
centuries-old silences about race that still create a
deep chasm across this nation's democratic life. In the
end, we must force our fellow citizens who happen to be
white, to come to terms with their own whiteness, their
guilt and fears about America's terrible racial past.

If there is any hope for meaningful change inside U.S.
electoral system in the future, it lies with progressive
leaders like Barack Obama. If we can dare to dream
politically, let us dream of the world as it should be.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Manning
Marable, PhD is one of America's most influential and
widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been
Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History
and African-American Studies at Columbia University in
New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding
director of the Institute for Research in African-
American Studies at Columbia University, from 1993 to
2003. Dr. Marable is an author or editor of over 20
books, including Living Black History: How Reimagining
the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial
Future (2006); The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A
Hero's Life And Legacy Revealed Through His Writings,
Letters, And Speeches (2005); Freedom: A Photographic
History of the African American Struggle (2002); Black
Leadership: Four Great American Leaders and the Struggle
for Civil Rights (1998); Beyond Black and White:
Transforming African-American Politics (1995); and How
Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in
Race, Political Economy, and Society (South End Press
Classics Series) (1983). His current project is a major
biography of Malcolm X, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention, to be published by Viking Press in 2009.