A Firsthand Account Of The Jim Crow South From Historian Who Lived It

The time was 1989. I was interviewing almost 200 carefully selected experts and ordinary citizens for my television series on the 1960s titled Making Sense of the Sixties. Each individual selected was unique in their ability to present their story and if you are watching this, the chances are you have already watched other clips from my 1989 interviews.

The speaker is Manning Marable and I will never forget my interview with him. He was incredibly clear thinking in part because he had seen and he had lived through what he was describing. Before the interview began, I asked him to be direct and honest about how he felt – no hyperbole. That he did in spades.

Manning Marable was a professor at Columbia University and a passionate admirer of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, of whom he wrote an autobiography.

At the time, I was not a fan of Malcolm X but Maning got me to appreciate the good side of the man rather than to focus only his early anti-white and anti-Semitic statements.

Manning Marable was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. His mother was a ordained minister who held a PhD. In April 1986, at the behest of his mother, 17-year-old Manning covered the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. for Dayton’s black newspaper. That started his career.

Manning Marable held no quarter for what some black Americans were expressing at that time. Afrocentrism – looking at history from an African perspective rather than looking at history from a European perspective. He wrote (and I can hear him saying this):
"Afrocentrism was a theory that served the upwardly mobile black petty bourgeoisie. It gave them a sense of ethnic superiority without requiring the hard, critical study of historical realities. It was the latest theoretical construct of a politics of racial identity, a worldview designed to discuss the world… but never really to change it.”

Manning Marable died in 2011 at 61 years old.
I thank him for the power and clarity of his interview.

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