CASCAID
 Community Advocacy Support Center
  A Community Service Project of the Western Washington Debate Union
 

2008 Keynote Address
Friday, May 2, 7pm -- WWU VU Multi-Purpose Room
 

Dr. Manning Marable is one of America’s most influential and widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, from 1993 to 2003. Under Dr. Marable’s leadership, the Institute became one of the nation’s most prestigious centers of scholarship on the black American experience.

Born in 1950, Dr. Marable received his B.A. degree from Earlham College in 1971, his M.A. degree in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1972 and his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Maryland in 1976. Before coming to Columbia, Dr. Marable was previously Senior Research Associate of Africana Studies at Cornell University (1980-1982); Professor of History and Economics, and Director of the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University (1982-1983); Professor of Sociology and founding director of Colgate University’s Africana and Latin American Studies Program (1983-1986); Chair of the Black Studies Department at Ohio State University (1987-1989); and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder (1989-1993).

Dr. Marable is a prolific author. Since earning his Ph.D. three decades ago, he has written almost 200 articles in academic journals and edited volumes. He has written and/or edited 21 books and scholarly anthologies, including Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006); Co-editor with Myrlie Evers Williams, The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005); Editor, The New Black Renaissance (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2005); W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Radical Democrat, New Updated Edition (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2005); The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003); Freedom On My Mind: The Columbia Documentary History of the African American Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Co-author with Leith Mullings, Freedom (London: Phaidon, 2002); Co-editor with Leith Mullings, Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African-American Anthology (Lanham, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield, 2000); Editor, Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Black Leadership (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Black Liberation in Conservative America (Boston: South End Press, 1997); Speaking Truth to Power (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996); Beyond Black and White (London: Verso, 1995); Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991); Black American Politics (London: Verso, 1985); and How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1983).

His current books-in-progress include: Co-editor, with Keesha Middlemass and Ian Steinberg, Racism, Criminal Justice and the Law (forthcoming, tentatively in 2007); Co-editor, with Ian Steinberg, Race, Globalization and Empire (forthcoming, tentatively in 2007); and a comprehensive biography of African-American leader Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz), entitled: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2009).

Professor Marable is a national leader in the development of web-based, educational resources on the African American experience. With Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, he has directed the production of two courses on W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, respectively; a multimedia version of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in 2001; and a massive multimedia version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, featuring 440 historical annotations, 78 newsreel and film clip footage of Malcolm X, 216 photographs, over 200 government documents and original oral history interviews with Malcolm X’s friends and associates. In 2005 Dr. Marable and members of his Malcolm X Biography Project designed the content for the multimedia educational kiosks featured at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center at the historic Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, the site of Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination.

In 2002, Dr. Marable established the Center for Contemporary Black History (CCBH) at Columbia University, an advanced research and publications center that examines black leadership and politics, culture and society. CCBH produces Souls, a quarterly academic journal of African-American Studies, which is published and distributed internationally by Taylor and Francis Publishers. With the support of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation), CCBH’s Africana Criminal Justice Project has conducted a national survey of Black Studies departments to promote the development of new courses on race, crime and justice; compiled hundreds of original texts in an African American archive examining “the meaning of justice” throughout black history; and taught courses on hip hop culture and critical criminology inside Riker’s Island Correctional Facility in New York City. CCBH also directs the digital knowledge production of Black Studies educational resources.

Since 1976, Dr. Marable has written a political commentary series, “Along the Color Line,” that appears in over four hundred newspapers and journals worldwide. He is regularly featured in national and international media. He donates much of his time fundraising and speaking on behalf of prisoners’ rights, labor, civil rights, faith-based institutions, and other social justice organizations. Dr. Marable lectures annually in Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York, in a Master’s Degree Program for prisoners.