RIP Dr. Manning Marable

Manning Marable, celebrated Columbia University professor and top Civil Rights scholar, dies.

Columbia University professor Manning Marable, an expert on African-American history, died Friday just days before his long-awaited biography of Malcolm X is released.

In "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," the 60-year-old scholar was expected to identify an elderly Newark man as Malcolm's chief assassin, sources said.

Three other men were convicted of killing the civil rights firebrand in 1965.

"He would want to be remembered for being both a scholar and an activist and as someone who saw the two as not being separated," Manning's widow, Leith Mullings Marable, told The Root, an online magazine.

Fellow historian Abdur-Rahman Muhammad called the Marable's biography Malcolm X his "crowning achievement."

It is "the culmination of over 20 years of research and writing," he said.

Marable, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia, had battled the lung disease sarcoidosis for a quarter century.

He underwent a double lung transplant last summer and appeared to be on the mend until he was hospitalized with pneumonia last month.

Born May 13, 1950 in Dayton, Ohio, Marable spent much of his life combating racism and chronicling the history of blacks in America.

A prolific writer, Marable wrote or edited nearly 20 books and scholarly anthologies and was the author of 275 academic articles.

Marable was also the prime mover in the "Amistad Project," a multimedia resource project designed to help teach African-American history in public schools.

His Malcolm X biography, published by Viking Press, will be released Monday.

csiemaszko@nydailynews.com

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If you wanna learn about Dr. Marable's research on Malcolm X autobiography you can do it here:

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

The Institute for Research in African-American Studies of Columbia University

The Malcolm X Project


About the Book

Years in the making-the definitive biography of the legendary black activist.

Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world.

Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of the most singular forces for social change, capturing with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.

About the Author

Manning Marable is M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African American Studies and professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. He was founding director of African American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003. Since 2002, he has directed Columbia's Center for Contemporary Black History. The author of fifteen books, Marable is also the editor of the quarterly journal Souls.