Dr. Manning Marable (1950-2011) was a prolific scholar whose work in the arenas of history, political science and social criticism inspired popular and academic audiences. Born to James and June Morehead Marable, schoolteachers who enforced a regimen of U.S. and world history books, he soon discovered the gift of historical imagination.
Dr. Marable earned a bachelor’s degree from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., and a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin before receiving his doctorate from the University of Maryland in 1976. He directed ethnic studies programs at a number of colleges, notably the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University and the Africana and Latin American Studies program at Colgate University. He was the chairman of the black studies department at Ohio State University in the late 1980s and also taught ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
At Columbia University, where he became a professor of public affairs, political science, history and African-American studies in 1993, he was the founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and the Center for the Study of Contemporary Black History.
Dr. Marable wrote prodigiously. He authored over 200 articles in academic journals and edited volumes. Marable also wrote over twenty books including: Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (1945-1982), The Great Wells of Democracy : The Meaning of Race in American Life, Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle as well as two biographies published in 2005, W. E. B. DuBois: Black Radical Democrat and The Autobiography of Medgar Evers, which he edited with Myrlie Evers-Williams.
He was the general editor of Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary History of the African American Experience (2003). Dr. Marable served as founding editor of Souls, a journal of black history, politics and culture. He created archives and digital resources for teachers and researchers. He served on the board of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History.
On April 15, 2011, Dr. Marable was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the History for his 2011 release, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. The book was released just days after he died from complications of pneumonia.