Marable, William Manning

Impact on the world

Marable's 1983 debut, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, argued from an explicitly socialist perspective that American capitalism was structurally organized to perpetuate Black economic disadvantage, establishing him as one of the era's most prominent Marxist scholars of the Black experience; he went on to write or edit more than 30 books and hundreds of articles over his career, while his nationally syndicated column, launched in 1976 as “From the Grassroots” and later “Along the Color Line,” reached readers in more than 100 Black newspapers for over three decades. Recruited by historian Eric Foner in 1993 to found Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Marable led it for a decade, building it into one of the nation's leading centers of Black studies scholarship, and later founded Columbia's Center for Contemporary Black History and the academic journal Souls. His final work, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, drew on more than a decade of research into FBI, CIA, and State Department records to challenge and complicate the standard narrative of Malcolm X's life; published the day after Marable's death from complications of sarcoidosis, the book won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History, though its conclusions about aspects of Malcolm X's personal life and the investigation into his assassination drew significant criticism and debate among scholars and Malcolm X's own family.

Life & background

Born William Manning Marable on May 13, 1950, in Dayton, Ohio, to two schoolteachers, Marable earned his B.A. from Earlham College in 1971 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin and University of Maryland by 1976. He held faculty and administrative posts at Smith College, Tuskegee Institute, Cornell, Fisk, Colgate, Ohio State, and the University of Colorado before joining Columbia University in 1993, where he remained until his death in Manhattan on April 1, 2011, at age 60, from complications of sarcoidosis.

Sources

1. American Historical Association (Perspectives on History); BlackPast.org; Columbia University Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies