Scholar Manning Marable to give 2009 Thurgood Marshall lecture at UCLA
Manning Marable, noted scholar of African American history and founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, will deliver the 2009 Thurgood Marshall lecture at UCLA on Thursday, April 16.
The event, which is organized by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, will begin with a reception at 6 p.m., followed by Marable's lecture at 7 p.m. in the Grand Horizon Room at UCLA's Covel Commons. This year's event is free in honor of the lecture's 20th anniversary.
"Dr. Manning Marable is an outstanding scholar and public intellectual whose work has made significant contributions to the social justice movement," said Darnell Hunt, director of the Bunche Center and a professor of sociology. "He clearly embodies the spirit of the Bunche Center's Thurgood Marshall Award, and I'm delighted that he'll be here this year to share his thoughts with both the UCLA and broader Los Angeles communities."
Each year, a prominent leader in the African American community is invited to speak at the Thurgood Marshall Lecture and Dinner on Law and Human Rights. The event honors the legacy and contributions of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, whose record of civil rights advocacy is inextricably linked to the African American struggle for social and economic justice. Past lecturers have included civil rights activist and former Black Panther Party chairperson Elaine Brown, law professor and author Lani Guinier, and late UCLA alumnus and noted attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.
Marable has had a long and pioneering academic career. A prolific author, his works include "Beyond Black and White: Race in America's Past, Present and Future" (Verso, 1995) and "The Crisis of Color and Democracy" (Common Courage Press, 1995), which received the Book of the Year award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. He also is the author of "The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life" (Basic Books, 2003) and co-editor of "Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle" (Phaidon, 2002).
Marable served as chair of the political science department at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute in 1976. At Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., he revived and directed the Race Relations Institute from 1982 to 1983. Marable established Colgate University's Africana and Latin American Studies program in 1983 and directed it until 1986, and he founded Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies in 1993 and directed it for the next 10 years.
"Under Dr. Marable's direction, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia became one of the nation's most prestigious centers of scholarship on the African American experience," Hunt said.
Marable also is the founding director of the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia.
Born in 1950, Marable received a bachelor's degree from Indiana's Earlham College in 1971, a master's degree in American history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972 and a doctorate in American history from the University of Maryland in 1976.
Those wishing to attend the event should R.S.V.P. by e-mailing brobinson@support.ucla.edu or calling 310-825-7716.