Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,965

This is the grave of Manning Marable.

Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1950, Marable came out of the Black activist-intellectual class based in that area since the 19th century. His parents had both gone to Central State in Wilberforce, a long-time center of Black higher education. His mother especially was an activist, a minister and scholar who had her son go to Atlanta in 1968 to cover Martin Luther King’s funeral for Dayton’s Black newspaper. Heady stuff for a kid at that moment in time.

Marable went to Earlham College and graduated in 1971. He wanted to go into history at a time when Black history was just being accepted by the academy. He did a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin and then a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, which he completed in 1976. He would be the type of high-end scholar who would move around all the time, always looking for something new. So he taught basically everywhere, from Tuskegee to Columbia, founding the Africana and Hispanic Studies Program at Colgate along the way, as well as teaching at 7 or 8 other schools.

Marable also was an activist both in and outside his scholarship. He was part of the New American Movement in the late 70s that tried to revive Students for a Democratic Society for a new era. That eventually merged with Michael Harrington’s organization, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, to create Democratic Socialists of America, in 1982. Marable was a leader. But the organization soon split when Harrington refused to back Jesse Jackson’s presidential run in 1984 and Marable left. I should look into this–why wouldn’t Harrington back Jackson? Anyway, around that time, Marable also worked closely with other Black activists in trying to use hip-hop to create social change, which at a time when the new music was seen as so so scary by white folks and plenty of conservative of Black folks too, this was important work.

It was also in the mid 80s that Marable became a publishing beast. He was a very active scholar and writer. That started with 1983’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and then 1987’s African and Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to Maurice Bishop. One of my co-bloggers here has been talking about a “second Reconstruction,” but it’s worth noting that we’ve already had the Second Reconstruction. That was the civil rights movement. Black scholars have articulated since about 1980. We are presently in the second Jim Crow aftermath of that; we will need a third Reconstruction, not a second and we need to remember that Reconstruction narratives are fundamentally about Black Americans. Marable was one of those historians articulating the second Reconstruction thesis, as he did in 1991’s Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-1990, which also came out in later editions that extended the date into the future. I think the final edition, the 3rd, went to 2006.

Marable then published The Crisis of Color and Democracy, an award winning book. Other books from the late 90s and early 00s included Beyond Black and White: Transforming African American Politics in 1995, Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism in 1996, Black Liberation in Conservative America in 1997, Black Leadership in 1998, Let Nobody Turn Us Around in 2000, and Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle in 2002. This I assume is the “I didn’t sleep” period of Marable’s life.

Later, Marable moved toward biography to tell his stories. 2005’s W.E.B. DuBois: Black Radical Democrat may not have gotten quite as much attention as the David Levering Lewis book from some years before that, but it was close. Then came Marable’s much anticipated 2011 biography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention sure was controversial. Marable was an excellent historian and he explored the real history of Malcolm, not myths. So Marable noted and detailed the likely fact that Malcolm had homosexual relationships in his youth. And oh my god did people freak out about that. See, this book came out at the moment when even professional historians were turning the Black Power movement’s figures into heroes. That happened in part because the first generation of civil rights movement scholars had largely damned Black Power as totally negative, destroying the glorious mainstream civil rights movement by the late 60s. That wasn’t really true and ignored a lot of conditions on the ground that led to those changes. That these were largely white liberals writing a lot of those histories contributed to this. Meanwhile, a new generation of younger Black scholars were starting to write their books and they saw Malcolm and Stokley and the Panthers as near heroic figures. That was pretty problematic too, given how often their violent rhetoric got turned on their own movement, etc.

Well, central to much of this was a version of Black masculinity tied into heterosexuality. Note as well that in 2011, the gay rights movement wasn’t as centered even in left and liberal rhetoric and identity as it is today. Marriage was just becoming a reality, for example. So when Marable pointed out Malcolm’s past, it overwhelmed the rest of the book because so many figures who lionized Malcolm were really uncomfortable with statements that seemed to challenge and undermine the revolutionary Black masculinity that had dominated a lot of left narratives since the 60s. There became a whole industry of people trying to take down Marable’s book. Now, if you go over any work with a fine-toothed comb and a desire to create “gotcha!” moments, you can challenge just about anything. The other thing that upset a lot of these people was Marable’s claim that some of Malcolm’s had never been caught, which brought up another sore subject it was easier to dismiss than explore. The book however won many major awards, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and other leading Black scholars defended the book as well. But if you want to hate something because it challenges mythological ideas of masculinity, well, you aren’t going to care.

Unfortunately, Marable wasn’t around for this. He had a lung condition called sarcoidosis, which sounds unpleasant. He had to have a double lung transplant in 2010 and that did not fix things, for he died of pneumonia in 2011, three days before the publication date of his Malcolm biography. He was 60 years old.

I also must note Marable’s wife Leith Mullings. She was a leading anthropologist. Born in 1945 in Mandeville, Jamaica, she grew up in the upwardly mobile Black middle class of New York. She first trained as a nurse but then decided she wanted to be an anthropologist and got her PhD in 1975 from the University of Chicago. She was originally an Africanist and wrote Therapy, Ideology and Social Change: Mental Health and Healing in Urban Ghana as her first book. Then she continued to look at health disparities, this time in New York, with  The Social Context of Reproduction in Central Harlem. She became president of the American Anthropological Association in 2011. She died in 2020.

Manning Marable is buried in Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Manhattan, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other winners of the Pulitzer Prize in History, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Thomas McCraw, who won in 1985 for Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lawrence Cremin, who won in 1981 for American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 is in Woodbridge, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.