Manning Marable, 1950–2011

Manning Marable was ready to unveil his life’s crowning achievement when he died of an ailment he thought he had overcome. Manning, a pioneer of the black-studies movement and the author or editor of nearly 20 books, had recently completed a 594-page biography of Malcolm X that promised to shake up settled notions about the black leader, and his publisher was scheduling television interviews. But in early March, Marable was admitted to a Manhattan hospital suffering from pneumonia. He died last week, just days before the launch of his book. “It’s heartbreaking he won’t be here on publication day with us,” said Wendy Wolf, his editor at Viking Press.

Born to a businessman father and an educator mother in Dayton, Ohio, Marable grew up fascinated by the U.S. civil-rights movement, said the Associated Press. As a child, he “witnessed the emergence of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as nonviolent movements in the South struggling to break the back of white supremacy.” By the time he reached his late teens, he was writing political columns for a neighborhood newspaper. When King was assassinated in 1968, he attended the funeral, encouraged by his mother, “to witness a significant event in our people’s history,” he wrote. He said later that the funeral launched him on “a trajectory from reform to radicalism.”

Educated at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Maryland, Manning emerged in the 1970s as a “precocious black-studies professor” with an infectious “obsession with black history and culture,” said TheRoot​.com. He set up or directed black-studies programs at several schools, including Fisk University and Colgate University, and in 1993 joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he founded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and the Center for Contemporary Black History. A walking “encyclopedia Africana,” he was known for delivering impromptu “disquisitions on race, culture, and politics that expertly illuminated the mechanisms of injustice.”

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Marable struggled with sarcoidosis, a chronic disease that gradually robs its sufferers of lung function, as he worked to finish his Malcolm X biography, said The New York Times. He received a double lung transplant in July 2010. The book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, “presents a hefty counterweight” to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an “as-told-to” account written with Alex Haley. Dismissing Haley’s book as “fictive,” Marable presents a Malcolm X who was “often subject to doubts about theology, politics, and other matters,” far from “the figure of unswerving moral certitude” presented in The Autobiography. Most explosively, Marable offers a revisionist account of Malcolm X’s assassination, concluding that the “kill shot” was fired by Willie Bradley, now living as Al-Mustafa Shabazz in Newark, N.J. Two other men were convicted of the murder, and Shabazz has denied being the shooter.

Marable was disillusioned by U.S.-style capitalism, as can be inferred from the title of one of his early books, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. When, as he often did, he bought lunch for one of his impoverished graduate students, he would answer the student’s embarrassed gratitude with a question: “Hey, what do you expect? I’m a socialist.”