In Memoriam: Professor Manning Marable (1950-2011)

Malcolm was the first prominent African American, arguably the first prominent American leader, to come out against the Vietnam War. And this was even during the time that he was in the Nation of Islam. It was Malcolm X who said that we had to go beyond civil rights to human rights. It was Malcolm X who said we don’t appeal to the US Congress to interrogate structural racism inside the United States; we take that to the United Nations. Three years later, it was Dr. King that followed out a path that Malcolm had clearly chartered for him, so that the internationalization and the Pan-Africanism of Malcolm that he advocated in 1964, all of that forms the foundation of what becomes Black Power and Pan-Africanism of Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panther Party three, four years later. Malcolm was the forerunner to the explosion of the black liberation struggle throughout the globe and black consciousness in South Africa and in the Caribbean. And so—but that organically grew out of, not a rupture from his past, but a growth from the foundations that his parents and others had established before, many years before.