NEW YORK — Dr. Manning Marable, an influential historian whose forthcoming Malcolm X biography could revise perceptions of the slain civil rights leader, died Friday, just days before the book described as his life’s work was to be released. He was 60 years old.
His wife, Leith Mullings, said Marable died from complications of pneumonia at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. She said he had suffered for 24 years from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease, and had undergone a double lung transplant in July.
“I think his legacy is that he was both a scholar and an activist,” she said. “He believed that history could be used to inform the present and the future.”
She said Marable’s latest book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, will be released today.
Two decades in the making, the nearly 600-page biography is described as a re-evaluation of Malcolm X’s life, bringing fresh insight to subjects including his autobiography, which is still assigned in many college courses, and to his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan on Feb. 21, 1965.
The book is based on exhaustive research, including thousands of pages of FBI files and records from the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department. Marable also conducted interviews with the slain civil rights leader’s confidants and security team, as well as witnesses to his assassination.
Dr. Blair Kelley, a history professor at North Carolina State University, called Marable’s death a “devastating” loss for Black historians.
