Manning Marable, the M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor
of African American Studies, founding director of Columbia’s Institute for
Research in African-American Studies and director of the Center for the Study
of Contemporary Black History, died on April 1. He was 60 and lived in New York
City. Marable’s death came just days before the publishing of his long-awaited biography,
and the culmination of his life’s work, Malcolm
X: A Life of Reinvention.
Marable had been at Columbia since 1993. During his 35-year academic career, he wrote and edited numerous books about African-American politics and history and remained one of the nation’s leading Marxist historians. He was a prolific writer and impassioned polemicist, addressing issues of race and economic injustice in numerous works that established him as one of the most forceful and outspoken scholars of African-American history and race relations in the United States.