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Manning Marable: 1950 - 2011
April 1, 2011
To the SIPA Community:
It is my sad duty to inform you that our colleague, Professor Manning Marable, died this afternoon after a long illness.
Professor Marable was the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of History and Public Affairs at Columbia. He devoted his life to the struggle for racial equality and social justice in the United States. He was a towering intellect and a man of immense personal courage. Columbia University, and the SIPA community in particular, mourn the loss of this great scholar and public intellectual.
A prolific author, Professor Marable's twelve books included Beyond Black and White: Race in America's Past, Present and Future (Verso 1995), The Crisis of Color and Democracy (Common Courage Press 1995), which was awarded the Book of the Year by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights (1996); The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (Basic Books 2003); Freedom: A Photographic History of the African-American Freedom Struggle, which he coedited with Leith Mullings and Sophie Spencer-Wood (Phaidon 2002); and "9/11: Racism in a Time of Terror," in Souls (Winter 2002).
At Columbia, Professor Marable served as founding director of African-American Studies from 1993 to 2003. Since 2002, he directed Columbia's Center for Contemporary Black History.
Professor Marable received his BA from Earlham and his PhD from University of Maryland. Prior to coming to Columbia, he taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Ohio State University, where he was chairman of the Department of Black Studies. He also served as the founding director of the Africana and Hispanic Studies Program at Colgate University.
As we learn more about ways in which to express condolences, I will share them with you. For now, I know I speak for us all when I say our community will miss him.
Respectfully,
John H. Coatsworth
Dean