Manning Marable - Beyond Boundaries - The Manning Marable Reader

Beyond Boundaries

The Manning Marable Reader

MANNING MARABLE

Edited by
R USSELL R ICKFORD

First published 2011 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Contents

by Manning Marable

by Russell Rickford

The black intellectual tradition is the body of critical analysis and scholarly commentary about the people of African descent, over the past several centuries. At the core of this tradition is black historythe study and documentation of the black experience over time. In traditional West African societies, local historians who had memorized the sagas of their people were called griots. In the United States, for many years the enterprise of black history was suppressed and distorted. White historians for many years discounted oral histories or testimonies from slave griots about their lives in bondage, for example, because such evidence was deemed biased. It was only within the black intellectual tradition that scholars placed at the center of their work the perspectives and voices of African-American people. These intellectuals understood that historys power was rooted not simply in memory but also in possibility. A clear vision of the future begins with an understanding of the past.

My introduction to the black intellectual tradition came initially from my mother, June Morehead Marable. During World War II my mother worked as a secretary at a military installation. Saving her money, in the fall of 1944, June matriculated at historically black Wilberforce University in Ohio. She was subsequently employed as a housekeeper for several years in the home of Wilberforce college president, Dr. Charles H. Wesley. A noted historian of the African-American experience, Wesley made history accessible to everyday people through his popular writings and lectures. After his presidencies at Wilberforce and Central State University, Wesley went on to lead the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. When my mother graduated in 1948, she promised that one of her children would become a black historian, in honor of Wesley. Two years later, on May 13, 1950, I was born in Dayton, Ohio. My mother, a public school teacher, organized a regime of obligatory books to read, covering US and world history. Every summer I wrote dozens of book reviews analyzing increasingly complex studies. And I loved all of it. I found freedom within the historical imagination, the search for meaning in our past. My life and career as a historian had been determined before I was born.

Consequently, from the beginning of my academic life I viewed being a historian of the black experience as becoming the bearer of truths or stories that had been suppressed or relegated to the margins. Following the models of W. E. B. Du Bois and Wesley, I came to understand that history itself could empower the oppressed; that history always had a point of view, and the perspectives we assume inevitably shape the outcomes of our inquiry. I came to recognize the complicated dialectics of history: that all people make history, but not in ways they choose, to paraphrase Marx. History, to the disadvantaged, can become a site of resistance and cultural renewal. It forms the foundations necessary for an alternative consciousness.

Beyond Boundaries presents an outline of my life and adventure as a public historian and radical intellectual in the final decades of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first century. There have been several central themes that have defined nearly all of my work. The first and foremost is a questionwhich also preoccupied Frantz Fanon and Malcolm Xthe nexus between history and black consciousness: what is the meaning of black group identity as interpreted through the stories of African-American people, over time? How do oppressed people create the tools and language of resistance? I have tried to answer these questions by examining the rise and fall of different sorts of black social movements within the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. Each struggle is unique, yet there are also general lessons that can be taken from these experiences as a whole. Consciousness also involves the question of how people define leadershipthe capacity of any group to realize its interests and visions. Because African Americans were denied voting rights and full political representation for hundreds of years, they evolved attitudes about politics and leadership that most white Americans did not share.

I was also fortunate to come to maturity at a time when the Black Freedom Movement in the United States emphasized the connections and commitments with Africa, other parts of the African diaspora, and other international populations. There has always been a long history of internationalism, of course, within the African-American political culture. Henry Highland Garnet, Edward Wilmot Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Paul Robeson, and Ralph Bunche all in different ways expressed internationalism. In the early 1970s, an intellectual commitment to Pan-Africanism meant, to me, that it was impossible to be a serious, well-grounded student of black American history without also knowing a good deal about Africa and the Caribbean as well. Consequently, my doctoral dissertation was a biographical study of John Langalibalele Dube, the first president and cofounder of the African National Congress (ANC). Although the primary focus of my writing from the late 1970s on was devoted to black America and the United States, I continued to analyze events and struggles across the African diaspora. I wrote extensively, for example, about the anti-apartheid movement, the triumph of the ANC, and the difficulties and challenges of post-apartheid society. I developed political and academic contacts across the black world, but especially in Jamaica, Cuba, and Great Britain. My conversations and debates with the Cubans and Jamaicans in the 1980s, for example, deeply influenced my 1987 book African and Caribbean Politics.

Finally, I have long been preoccupied with studying the role of intellectuals in the remaking of racialized societies. Theoretically, my points of reference were provided by the writings and lives of Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Antonio Gramsci. Du Bois was the consummate Renaissance man, a genius in the arts, literature, sociology, and historical writing. But he was never content just to interpret the world. So he also helped to establish the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People five years later. James continually linked theoretical work to political practice, from his involvement in the international Trotskyist movement during the 1930s, to his leadership role in Trinidad and Tobagos independence movement, and subsequently in the Federation movement in the English-speaking Caribbean in the late 1950searly 1960s. Gramsci provides the great example of how a critically engaged mind can overcome even the draconian power of prisons. I have learned from each of them and have tried to apply the same discipline and passion they embody to my own endeavors.