Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future

by Manning Marable

Overview

Are the stars of the Civil Rights firmament yesterday's news? In Living Black History scholar and activist Manning Marable offers a resounding "No!" with a fresh and personal look at the enduring legacy of such well-known figures as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers and W.E.B. Du Bois. Marable creates a "living history" that brings the past alive for a generation he sees as having historical amnesia. His activist passion and scholarly memory bring immediacy to the tribulations and triumphs of yesterday and reveal that history is something that happens everyday. Living Black History dismisses the detachment of the codified version of American history that we all grew up with. Marable's holistic understanding of history counts the story of the slave as much as that of the master; he highlights the flesh-and-blood courage of those figures who have been robbed of their visceral humanity as members of the historical cannon. As people comprehend this dynamic portrayal of history they will begin to understand that each day we-the average citizen-are "makers" of our own American history. Living Black History will empower readers with knowledge of their collective past and a greater understanding of their part in forming our future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786722440
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	01/03/2006
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	298 KB
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Manning Marable is Professor of History, Political Science, and Public Policy, at Columbia University. Marable lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

Chapter I Living Black History: Black Consciousness, Place, and America's Master Narrative 1

Chapter II Mapping Black Political Culture: Leadership, Intellectuals, and Resistance 39

Chapter III Resurrecting the Radical Du Bois 67

Chapter IV Malcolm X's Life-After-Death: The Dispossession of a Legacy 121

Chapter V The Unfulfilled Promise of Brown: From Desegregation to Global Racial Justice 179

Notes 223

Index 253

Editorial Reviews

In this sharp, savvy collection, several pieces of which began as W.E.B. Du Bois lectures at Harvard in 2004, Columbia University scholar Marable (The Autobiography of Medgar Evers) declares that "being true to black history... means accepting and interpreting its totality." Living black history, Marable posits, requires "reconstruct[ing] America's memory about itself" through projects that give voice to the voiceless. Marable takes a historian's pleasure in reproaching those (like Kweisi Mfume and Henry Louis Gates Jr.) who discount Du Bois's commitment to radicalism. He similarly admonishes those, from the black middle class or hip-hop "Malcolmologists," who seize on Malcolm X's resistance without recognizing-as Marable does in dissecting Alex Haley's unreliable Autobiography and criticizing the Shabazz family-Malcolm X's unquenched, pan-Africanist voice. An essay on lawyer Robert Carter, who helped win Brown v. Board of Education, prompts the author's reflection on gains blacks have made in access to educational institutions, and also his lament that Brown has not helped the working class or the poor. But Marable offers no targeted solution for African-American uplift. Rather, given his socialist leanings-less articulated here than in other works-he supports cross-racial and class-based efforts to fight structural racism. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Adding two essays to the three he delivered at the 2004 W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University, the prolific Marable (African American studies, Columbia Univ.; The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life) seeks a civic conversation to expose the destructive process of racialization in historical context. Focusing on the life work of activist scholar W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), black Muslim spokesman Malcolm X (1925-65), and NAACP desegregation strategist and federal judge Robert L. Carter (b. 1917), he reviews differing approaches to overthrowing Jim Crow's physical and psychological oppression. The spirit and strategies of such earlier struggles, he suggests, offer guidance for African Americans and all other Americans in today's and tomorrow's pressing battles against racism of every stripe and global apartheid. True history points, he insists, to the continuing quest for racial justice and genuine democracy. Ever provocative, Marable has again offered a moving vision of America's past, present, and future. For collections on U.S. and black history, society, and politics.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Wide-ranging essay on the challenges African-Americans face in shaping a history to call their own. Marable (The Great Wells of Democracy, 2003) argues that that very history has been altered, co-opted and otherwise ill served by a variety of agents. On one hand, for instance, there are well-meaning liberals who "are unwilling or unable to question the dispossession of wealth from African Americans in the form of unpaid labor exploitation"; on the other are the heirs of Malcolm X and C.L.R. James, who, for one reason or another, have failed to put papers and other archival materials in order, so that a trove of Malcolm's documents have fallen into unscholarly hands merely because someone neglected to pay storage-locker rent. Marable throws up great walls of language: "Any conceptual break from the rigid orthodoxies of global apartheid and U.S. structural racism . . . forces upon us the necessities to delegitimize all existing privileged systems of racial hierarchies and categories, and simultaneously to construct a new social paradigm." Break a paradigm, make a paradigm: A real-world example or two would benefit the mystified reader, who may still be wondering whether confronting evidence of the racist past in the form of street names and the like is not to be preferred to sweeping that evidence away, the better to soothe modern sensitivities. In his opening essay, Marable seems undecided on the point, but he is far more confident when writing of such things as the curious process by which The Autobiography of Malcolm X came to be (Malcolm and Alex Haley, his as-told-to writer, did not agree on much) and the need to address structural racism and classism lest we develop into "an unequal,two-tiered, uncivil American society" in which African-Americans do not have much voice-or about what we have now. Useful arguments with some interesting turns: What would have happened if the promise of 40 acres and a mule had been kept?

Kirkus Reviews