The NY Times reports:
Manning Marable, Historian and Social Critic, Dies at 60
Manning Marable, a leading scholar of black history and a leftist critic of American social institutions and race relations, whose long-awaited biography of Malcolm X, more than a decade in the writing, is scheduled to be published on Monday, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 60.
William Manning Marable was born on May 13, 1950, in Dayton, Ohio. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., and a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin before receiving his doctorate from the University of Maryland in 1976. He directed ethnic studies programs at a number of colleges, notably the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University and the Africana and Latin American Studies program at Colgate University.
He was the chairman of the black studies department at Ohio State University in the late 1980s and also taught ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At Columbia University, where he became a professor of public affairs, political science, history and African-American studies in 1993, he was the founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and the Center for the Study of Contemporary Black History.
He was one of the foremost scholars on the life and work of Malcolm X, and was the Director of the Columbia University Malcolm X Project.
His next book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, is scheduled to be released next week.
Condolences to his wife, Dr. Leith Mullings, and to his family.