Dr. Russell Rickford hasn’t quite been the same since learning that his mentor and friend, Dr. Manning Marable, passed away at the age of 60, after suffering from complications from pneumonia.
Marable, who was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, underwent a double lung transplant last summer, but friends thought he was on the rebound toward recovery, eager to celebrate the release of his new book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a project that took him 10 years to research and write.
A self-described Marxist, Marable had a distinguished career in the academy as a social activist and public intellectual. At the time of his death, he held the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professorship of African American Studies at Columbia University, after serving as the founding director of the university’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies and establishing the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia in 2002.
After writing dozens of books and publishing more than 250 scholarly articles, friends and close associates of Marable say that he was most excited about his latest book, which was released on April 4, 2011.
“He understood this was going to be his magnum opus,” says Rickford, an assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College. “It’s a remarkable book because it transforms the way we understand Malcolm and it should imbue us with a greater respect for Malcolm’s political and intellectual legacy”
Rickford first met Marable in 2002 after arriving at Columbia as a graduate student. After serving as his dissertation advisor, Marable recently entrusted Rickford to edit and publish Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader, a major collection of his intellectual writings over the past three decades. The reader was released earlier this month.
Rickford is one of Marable’s “intellectual sons and daughters,” as he puts it. It’s a group to whom the the celebrity scholar was never too busy to provide counsel and advice.
