[Peace-discuss] Manning Marable

[David Green]

Manning Marable: A Brother, a Mentor, a Great Mind
By: Michael Eric Dyson
Posted: April 2, 2011 at 12:36 AM

Michael Eric Dyson recalls the pioneering scholar as a 20th-century Frederick 
Douglass who nurtured and inspired talented young academics.
 
I discovered Manning Marable as a 21-year-old freshman at Knoxville College, a 
historically black college I'd left my native Detroit to attend after working in 
factories and fathering a son during the time most college-bound kids are in 
school.
I was in the library stacks, browsing the sociology section, when I came upon a 
book that grabbed my attention: From the Grassroots: Social and Political Essays 
Towards Afro-American Liberation. It was clear that Marable's left politics 
reflected how he had baptized classic European social theory in the black 
experience. "Wow," I said to myself. "If Karl Marx was a brother, this is how 
he'd write and think."
The author photo on this intriguing book showed a young man with a handsome face 
that was crowned by a shock of black hair whose woolly Afro styling conjured a 
20th-century Frederick Douglass. As I was to learn later, the comparison to 
Douglass didn't end at the 'fro, since Marable, like his 19th-century 
predecessor, was an eloquent spokesman for the democratic dreams of despised 
black people.
As I devoured Marable's brilliant work -- including his quick 1980 follow-up, 
Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class Consciousness, and Revolution, and 
his pioneering 1983 work, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America -- I knew 
I was in the presence of a world-class intellectual who lent his learning to the 
liberation of the vulnerable masses. I was impressed that a man so smart and 
accomplished could so unashamedly identify with struggling black folk -- and I 
was really impressed that he was so young, only eight years older than I.
Years later, when he invited me to Columbia to teach as a visiting professor in 
the late '90s, and I recalled again to Marable my introduction to his work, he 
flashed that magnetic smile of his and said that he was glad his books could 
help a brilliant young intellectual find his way. That, of course, was vintage 
Marable: deflecting attention from his Herculean efforts to parse the meaning of 
black political destiny by embracing the promise of a younger colleague.
And that wasn't just something he did with me; Marable nurtured and guided a 
veritable tribe of graduate students and junior professors as they sought sure 
footing in the academy. He was generous with his time and insight; he had a real 
talent for spotting rising stars, and a genius for tutelage and inspiration, 
with either a bon mot if time was short or a hearty, dynamic, luxurious, 
sprawling conversation when you were blessed to find his inner circle.
 
What was remarkable about Marable is that he possessed none of the jealousies 
and backbiting that render the professional academic guild a highfalutin' 
version of hip-hop culture's lethal fratricidal tensions. Please don't be 
confused: Marable loved academic gossip and tidbits of underground cultural 
stories as much as the rest of us, but he was never mean-spirited or vicious in 
his often humorous relay of the folly or hubris of a colleague or acquaintance.
Marable was kind and sweet, a teddy bear of a patriarch who watched over his 
young charges with wise forbearance. And he proved, in the tender and enduring 
companionship that he forged with his life mate, the brilliant anthropologist 
Leith Mullings, that you can love and learn with a black woman and drink in her 
beauty and brains in one sweet swig.
Marable's huge hunger to tell the truth about black suffering could never be 
satisfied. In a relentless stream of articles, essays, newspaper columns and 
books, he detailed the burdens of race and class and how these forces -- along 
with gender, age and sexual orientation -- ganged up on black folk and mugged us 
at every turn, robbing us of our dignity and our right to exist without being 
ambushed by inequality and injustice.
Long before the term "public intellectual" became the rage, again, Marable 
showed us just what engaged academics worth their salt and degrees should be up 
to: offering sharp analysis of the social behaviors and political practices that 
shape or distort our democratic heritage, while encouraging the powerless to 
take on the mighty with pen and protest. Marable could never get enough of such 
work, and he taught us all how to combine sophisticated critical scrutiny and 
compassionate regard for the lowly, never putting either goal in jeopardy by 
neglecting the work that must be done to be both smart and good.
And now, even in death, Marable teaches us still. His magnum opus, his summum 
bonum -- what all of his books on the urgent relevance of black politics, the 
pitfalls and seductions of capitalism, the ironic opportunities and vices of 
history, the romance and ruin of culture, and the triumphs and travails of race 
have built up to -- is his book on Malcolm X, due out on Monday, April 4. It is 
now, sadly, a posthumously published masterwork that rescues the legendary 
leader from the catacombs of history, separating him from the hagiography of 
adoring acolytes and prying him free from the hateful grip of dismissive 
critics.
In death, Marable gives us a life's work. He speaks to us, too, in another way: 
the disease from which he perished, sarcoidosis, affects black folk in America 
far more than it does whites or other groups. Right down to his dying breath, 
Marable bore witness to the possibilities and pains, the privileges and 
limitations, of the black identity that he so brilliantly and bravely embraced.
I will sorely miss Marable as my very dear friend whom I love -- my mentor, my 
colleague and big brother -- and all of us will miss one of the greatest minds 
and one of the most forceful spirits this land and world have ever known.
 
Michael Eric Dyson is University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University 
and the author of 17 books, including his latest, Can You Hear Me Now? The 
Inspiration, Wisdom and Insight of Michael Eric Dyson.
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