Manning Marable

Manning Marable (1950–2011) was an American historian, scholar, and activist, and Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, and History at Columbia University. He founded Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies and was a leading figure in African American intellectual life for three decades. His posthumous book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011) was the product of over twenty years of research and represented the most comprehensive biography of Malcolm X ever written. It drew on new archival sources, FBI files, and interviews to complicate and deepen the portrait offered in Malcolm X's Autobiography. The book won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History, though Marable had died just three days before publication. Marable's other major works include How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983) and W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (1986). He was a prolific essayist and public intellectual whose writing appeared in hundreds of publications.