Black Collegian News & Views

The Black Collegian decided to use this Black History Month to examine the current role and disposition of black students regarding social activism and their sense of commitment to the advancement of black people as a group. To put the issue in a historical light, we interviewed Dr. Manning Marable, (below) noted commentator, historian and activist in his own right. Dr. Marable recently published Living Black History, a book that speaks to some of these issues.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: What would you say is the challenge or mission of black college students today as it relates to the collective advancement of black people?

DR. MARABLE: I just finished writing a book entitled Living Black History. Chapter Five addresses the challenge to the generation of students in the 21st century. Their challenge is unlike the Civil Rights era and the Black Power period of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. The generation beyond the hip-hop generation is now confronted with not Jim Crow segregation, but with a new deadly triangle. If one thinks historically, 400 years ago, the evil triangle of racism was the triangle slave trade that transported against their will millions of Africans to the Americas. The new deadly triangle of racism in the 21st century is the triangle between mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disenfranchisement. In Harlem about 50% of all males over the age of 21 are outside of the paid labor force.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Did you say 50%?

DR. MARABLE: Five oh. Fifty percent are either unemployed or only have part-time employment, or are only able to eke out a living through the informal economy. They hustle. Massive unemployment leads to incarceration. Of the people who are in prison in the U.S., one-third were unemployed at the time of their arrest. The others average less than $20,000 income every year prior to their arrest. So if you say, "Well, who's in prison?" It's unemployed people, low income, and poor people and low income working people. Then when you look at the racial demographics, about 45% to 50% of the 2.2 million Americans in prison are African-Americans. But the total number of incarcerated is six million, who are either in jail or prison, on probation, parole, or awaiting trial. You're talking about mass disenfranchisement.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: How are they disenfranchised?

DR. MARABLE: When they get out, in many states you lose the right to vote...for life. In most states, you lose the right to vote while you're in prison or jail, and also while you're on parole. It cripples the political clout of the African-American community. In Mississippi, a third of all black males have lost the right to vote for life. I think that this generation does not fully appreciate how the gains of the '60s and '70s through the deaths and sacrifices of so many people, are being erased all from the hip-hop generation, and for the 21st century.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Can you give us a brief description of the conditions that fostered the student activism of the '60s and '70s. What is it that impacted the students at that time?

DR. MARABLE: Well, in Living Black History, I talk about what motivated me. I attended Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral when I was a senior in high school. I saw the possibility that courageous women and men like Rosa Parks and Dr. King and Malcolm, could change the course of history. Even though I was 17, I was taking part in what history was. All of us who were activists in the '60s and '70s, felt very deeply that history was on our side, that we had the power to change the way things are.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: How does that mindset compare to now?

DR. MARABLE: Now, for many young people, unfortunately, there is a sense of disempowerment, that you can't change the way things are. So you get a reactionary current within part, not all, but part of the hip-hop community, that says, "I just want to get paid." Or, "It's all about bling bling." That's it. Rather than trying to advance or empower our community. The challenge to the hip-hop generation to see that it, too, has the capacity to make history, if they have confidence and challenge themselves.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Is there a difference between the message and the commitment of the black academy in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and 2006? I'm talking about both the black institutions and the black professors, black academicians, who, theoretically, have some ability to influence or inform black students.

DR. MARABLE: There's a big difference. Some of the differences are unfortunately very negative. A few are positive. In the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans in higher education attended historically black institutions. In 1946 there were 45,000 African-Americans enrolled in college. By 1960, the number had increased to 200,000, but still three-fourths of that number were at black institutions. By 1975, the number of black students in colleges had risen to 666,000. It had more than tripled. By 1980, it was 1.1 million. This is a tremendous increase. But in the '70s, three-fourths of those students were attending white institutions. Today, about 84% attend predominantly white institutions. When you desegregated higher education, there was a brain drain from black institutions. And I'm part of that brain drain. I believe in being self-critical. I was the chair of political science at Tuskegee University, then Tuskegee Institute, from 1976 to 1979. And then in the '80s, I was the director of Fisk's race relations institute.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: What institutions have most of our front line intellectuals now?

DR. MARABLE: Most black prominent public intellectuals today—go down the list -- Cornell West, Lonnie Guinier, Henry Louis Gates, and others, have never taught at a historically black college. And only a handful have ever attended them. I believe that Michael Dyson, is probably one of the few who actually did attend a black college, Knoxville College in Tennessee, as his undergraduate school. But that's about it. So you now have a whole generation of black intellectuals that are divorced from black institutions. That's not a good thing. And I'm at Columbia, but I'm also saying it's not a good thing.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Why not?

DR. MARABLE: Because liberation is about building strong black institutions, cultivating black leadership, and developing the capital resources—that's buildings, land, equity—that allows you to invest in civic institutions and non-profit organizations. That allows you to build prospective leadership, across the board, whether it's business, or cooperative, or schools, or private or public. When you don't have a strong black institutional base, you cripple the possibility of developing an effective leadership that speaks for you.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: What about the leaders who don't want to identify with or speak for Black people?

DR. MARABLE: This is another problem. You have people in positions who are African-American, but who have absolutely no sense of accountability to the concerns of the black population. They are black Americans but are they black leaders? The answer is no. In fact, they would be insulted if you called them that. It's something that Malcolm could have scarcely anticipated.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: You mean no one saw this coming?

DR. MARABLE: One of the things I try to strive for in Living Black History, is to explain how it happened that we began to be dispossessed of our own sense of black history. Part of the way it happened is a conspiracy of suppression—that is, that powerful white institutions, government, corporations, have a vested interest in suppressing any evidence of racial atrocities. Recently I gave the ML King honorary lecture in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is a town where, back in 1921, two thousand, five hundred black people were burned out of their homes. Over 200 black people were murdered, and nobody ever went to jail. And it was suppressed for 60 years. This is a danger—this goes back to the question of how do we challenge this generation of college students. They have to understand that their precious legacy, their heritage, is being deliberately suppressed and destroyed. So that young people are now confused and at a distance from their own history. What I'm saying to them is, "If you don't know where you've been, how can you possibly know where you're going?"

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: What are the responsibilities of the institutions as well as the movement itself to keep that legacy, to transmit that information to future generations?

DR. MARABLE: I think that institutions must be challenged. And I mean this across the board. Black institutions as well as public institutions that black people's tax money helps to subsidize. A good example is, the New York State Historical Society has for months had "The History of Slavery in New York State." It's the first, to my knowledge, major art gallery or museum to mount an exhibit, documenting slavery in a state, in U.S. history. Hopefully there will be others. This evidence of the vast crime, logically ushers in a discussion about compensation or reparations, based on international law. Which is why sisters and brothers like DR. W. E. B. Dubois and Malcolm X and Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and others raised, the necessity of internationalizing the struggle and taking it to the United Nations, or the World Court.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: The US also refused to sign the United Nations Non-Genocide Pact. Is the suppression you speak of a form of genocide?

DR. MARABLE: Exactly. Young people need to understand why it is that they are losing their history, and why it's being dispossessed. And the power that history provides for you to launch an argument for rearranging power relations. What were the consequences of 250 years of unpaid labor extracted by force, of rape, of mutilation, of destruction of family? Slaves built the foundations of the White House, George Washington's monument and much of the Capitol Building. So you have this curious amalgam of democracy in words, but structural racism in deeds, that forms the very foundation, quite literally the bricks and mortar, of the American system.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: So how should today's student respond to that? There's the question of how they get that information, who's responsible for making that happen? Then what is the responsibility of the student when they find this out?

DR. MARABLE: Well, I write as fast as I can, to tell the sisters and brothers what they need to know. But there is good, solid scholarship now out here, about understanding critically the dispossession of the past and the political economy of race and racism. This new deadly triangle of mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disenfranchisement, is really the "color-blind" racism of the 21st century. George Bush says, "Racist is the worst thing anyone could say to me." And at the same moment, the U.S. Justice Department is literally dismantling the three legal pillars of the Civil Rights movement represented by King: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the '65 Voting Rights Act, and the '68 Fair Housing Act. They are going after all three of those things by lack of enforcement or turning enforcement on its head. Like recently, the threat against Southern Illinois University on the ridiculous grounds of reverse discrimination. Institutions, like Columbia and Harvard for centuries denied access to African-Americans. Now when there is a tiny crack that allows for less than two generations, a small handful of qualified African-Americans to enter that school, then people shout 'reverse discrimination'.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Is that a fair call?

DR. MARABLE: It's the height of hypocrisy. The only way you can counter that is to be well-grounded in your own heritage and have a clear sense of the charge for the future. Then you stand on the shoulders of people like Dubois and indict a Bush regime that carries out the dismantling of civil rights. That is really what the challenge to this generation is. They have to, in the new deadly triangle of racism, fashion their own leadership and agency. Every generation, as Frantz Fanon put it, has a destiny. But it has two choices. Now, will they fulfill it, or will they betray it?

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Let's talk more about the discovering. You're documenting history in your books and there are countless volumes about our condition, history, and destiny. To what degree is the college student is exposed to any of this? In the '60s and '70s the Black Studies movement fought to include this information in college and high school curricula. Is this information taught in classes?

DR. MARABLE: Well, there's good news and bad news. There's a bifurcation or a division of information that occurs. The books that I write or that Henry Louis Gates writes, or Michael Erik Dyson writes, reach an academic-educated audience. People who attend college or community college, or access through NPR or BET, or listen or watch Tavis Smiley. But then there is a much larger group of young people who, while many of them do attend college, are largely outside of that kind of critical discussion. All of us have tried to figure out ways to reach that group. Brother Cornell West did a hip-hop CD. I'm on the board of the Hip-Hop National Action Network. I've done public dialogue with Russell Simmons. Michael Dyson can rap. But then there's another barrier of sisters and brothers completely outside of college, universities, community colleges, and even high schools. And reaching the millions of young men and women who are confined to prisons, that's been a challenge that I've taken up. At Columbia we have taught, since 2003, a course in Riker's Island that is for 15, 16, and 17-year-old young black and Hispanic males, using spoken word and poetry as ways of getting them to talk about race, crime and justice. So there are innovative ways that you can reach young people who are outside of the university and college setting. But not enough of that is being done.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: During the '60s and '70s, the Black Church was an integral part of promoting a sense of collective mission to young people. Do you see the Church having that type of impact on youth today?

DR. MARABLE: I think that there are thousands of faith institutions, the churches and masjids, that do still adhere to that model. But I also believe that you put your finger on something. That is, that in communities where there is a defection by younger people from traditional orthodox religion, from churches, as they lose young people, they tend to go into retrenchment. And these older brothers clamp down on leadership positions, and don't want to give up power or authority. They drive out folk. The NAACP, in many local areas, functions this way. It doesn't encourage the cultivation of young, activist-oriented leadership. Now in Wayne County, in Detroit, you have the very opposite model. That's why they have 50,000 members.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Excuse me, 50,000?

DR. MARABLE: That's right. About a tenth of the total NAACP membership is in metropolitan Detroit. But in cities like New York, you only have a fraction of that. Why? The most effective model of leadership is learning how to give up power and to train people to take your place. And this is perhaps the most important thing I've said in the interview...the number one failure of black political leadership organizing through our history in this country, over 400 years, has been our failure to devise models that cultivate and train—

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: New leaders?

DR. MARABLE: New leaders. To learn how to pass the mantle of leadership to successive generations, so that there should never be a sole black patriarchal leader of any movement or organization. Marcus Garvey failed to do that. Malcolm failed to do that. King, in many real ways, failed to do that. Jesse Jackson pulled the plug on his own movement, in '88 and '89.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: But the messianic model seems to be what we've adapted, even to our own detriment.

DR. MARABLE: People read too seriously into the first five chapters of the Bible. They came away with the black Moses model, which is not a good model for long-term victory. That is a model for resistance, a model that can get you across that river, but cannot build anything on the other side. Long-term, we have to find a model for victory. And perhaps this is the greatest challenge for young people with this new deadly triangle. Can we imagine a strategy for victory facing that? I'm not talking about a strategy of survival. I'm talking about a strategy of victory. How do we win this thing? How do we divide our opponents? How do we win over allies? How do we devise an agenda to fight for public policies that advance black interests as well as interests of others that will work in concert with us?

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: What does 'victory' look like for black people in measurable terms? And how do we get agreement on that, and transmit that to young people?

DR. MARABLE: I use a formulation that my good friend, Amiri Baraka, gave me that's helpful. The goal of the black historical experience is the achievement of freedom. Freedom equals two things to me. It equals equality plus self-determination. Equality means that whatever the institutional arrangements are, we have equal access and opportunity, whether it be economics, land tenure, business positions or educational opportunity in universities. Self-determination is the right of a people living in a defined geographical space to determine for itself collectively what its future will be. So that I'm concerned about both equality and self-determination.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: How does that play in the world theater of the Black diaspora?

DR. MARABLE: We live at a time where corporations now are far more powerful than most countries. Of the top 100 economic entities on earth, 51 are corporations, and 49 are countries. So black liberation must be interpreted trans-nationally. Our future is increasingly linked to all of the currents that are occurring all over the world. This is where Malcolm wanted to put black people. Malcolm was ahead of his time. These are perspectives that young people need to be talking about as they contemplate their future.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Are you speaking at a lot of college campuses right now?

DR. MARABLE: All over the place. The Pan-African studies folks at Kent State brought me in recently, and I've got invitations to Southern Illinois University, Penn State, Baylor University, Colgate University and Stanford.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: Do you get a lot of invitations to black colleges?

DR. MARABLE: You know, that has not happened. This is also an interesting thing. To a certain extent, historically black colleges get a free ride because their argument is, "Everybody's black, so it's assumed we're about the business of black history and black culture." We should not make that assumption. I think that there is a misservice that is done when we make assumptions about the integrity of an agenda simply because everybody is black.

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN: How can our readers get more information about your work and writings?

DR. MARABLE: I have a website in my name, ManningMarable.net. Also, I edit a journal called "Souls".  We just did a special issue on Dubois, and last year we did a really fine issue on Malcolm. We have an issue coming out on the South since the Civil Rights movement. You can get more information at www.soulsjournal.net.