Foreword
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and Beyond
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is a pioneering work. Though written more than three decades ago, in 1983, the book continues to provide an analysis that illuminates the conditions Black people confront today. In 2015, the New York Times reported that 1.5 million Black men were “missing,” forced out of society by early death, the “war on drugs,” mass incarceration, and joblessness.1 In 1983, when Manning Marable wrote How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, the Black community was experiencing the consequences of the draconian Reagan “revolution,” including an increase in racially motivated violence. Documenting the worsening conditions of African Americans on many fronts, Marable analyzed this as a class project, characterized by manipulating racial stereotypes to divert hundreds of billions of dollars from programs supporting human needs to the military, promoting the law-and-order mentality and the “war on drugs” at home. His extensive exploration of the roots of current conditions led him to conclude that the “most striking fact about American economic history and its politics is the brutal and systematic underdevelopment of Black people.”
While the hard-fought Black freedom movement has brought about some advances in the three decades since Marable wrote the book, the continued profitability of racism is apparent in many areas, such as the widening racial disparities in income and wealth, the continuing dispossession of land and neighborhoods, and the monetary benefits to financial institutions from speculative real-estate practices. However, it is also starkly evident in the discriminatory application of criminal justice and policing, the immediate results of which include mass incarceration and numerous murders of unarmed Black people by police officers. These discriminatory policies also have enormous economic ramifications, which range from raising money for the functioning of towns through fees and fines levied on Black people to the devastation of communities resulting from the absence of its members who are incarcerated or who cannot find employment because of a criminal record. Such processes are supported by a backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, taking the form of a postracial ideology claiming that racism no longer exists. Now, more than ever, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America remains one of the most relevant studies of how and why racism and capitalism continue, predicting that freedom for Black Americans cannot be achieved in a capitalist society and offering a way forward.
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I read and loved How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America many years before meeting its author. For me, as for countless others of my generation and since, the volume courageously and straightforwardly recounted the ways in which the U.S. capitalist state had underdeveloped Black America: “The constant expropriation of surplus value created by Black labor is the heart and soul of underdevelopment” (7). Though in the preface to the second edition, published in 2000, Manning was self-critical about the polemic style of his writing, we who read it appreciated the fact that he studiously avoided the passive exonerative voice, in which no one is responsible—things just happen. Though Manning and I were both of the rare breed of Black academics active in left organizations, we did not meet until 1994, when he came to give a job talk at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I was one of the few Black faculty members and therefore, not surprisingly, was recruited to persuade him to accept the position. He presented a passionate and visionary concept of a research institute that combined cutting-edge scholarship with activism and that brought together scholars and activists for debate and discussion. Equally impressive were his enthusiasm, dedication, and fierce determination, which I was later to discover were fueled by his prescient view that he could not count on living a long life.
Much to my dismay, Manning accepted the position of the founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, where, I must admit, he created a unique and outstanding institution. After spending a year on a fellowship in Paris, I returned to New York and we began to work together on various projects. We married in 1996 and became partners, companions, and comrades on the road of scholarship, activism, mentoring, and discovery for nearly two decades.
With the publication of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning quickly became one of the world’s leading Black theorists. Interrogating the intertwined relationship of race and class, his central argument is that the development of capitalism in the United States and the creation of its wealth were built upon the exploitation of the labor, knowledge, and lives of Black people through slavery, segregation, and discrimination. In other words, the development of the capitalist state is integrally related to the underdevelopment and oppression of Black America. “Development was . . . the institutionalization of the hegemony of capitalism as a world system. Underdevelopment was the direct consequence of this process: chattel slavery, sharecropping, peonage, industrial labor at low wages, and cultural chaos” (3).
In ten chapters covering various sectors and processes of the Black community—the working class, women and patriarchy, the poor, prisoners, capitalists, the church, education, and racist violence—Manning demonstrates the relationship between the wealth of the U.S. state and the superexploitation of Black people: “Afro-Americans have been on the other side of one of the most remarkable and rapid accumulations of capital seen anywhere in human history, existing as a necessary yet circumscribed victim within the proverbial belly of the beast” (1–2).
The book’s title was a tribute to Walter Rodney, a brilliant Guyanese historian, orator, and activist, whom I met in 1970 when teaching anthropology at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. Manning met him later when both were affiliated with the Institute of the Black World and, as a student, he was assigned to pick Rodney up at the airport and drive him around. Upon learning of his assassination in 1980, Manning decided to title the book in memory of Rodney’s classic study How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).2 Following Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1994),3 Rodney’s thesis that the transatlantic slave trade was central to understanding both Africa and Europe—transferring vast amounts of wealth to Europe while destroying African societies—significantly influenced both the argument and the structure of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America.
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and Black Americans Today
Manning began the preface to the second edition by expressing a feeling that many authors have experienced: “There is always an element of ambivalence that separates an author from her or his previously published work. . . . The text of the book does not change over time: it is what it is. Yet the author continues to rethink basic ideas embedded in her or his work, coming up with new insights and conclusions, sometimes contradicting one’s earlier views” (xxix). Rereading the text in 2000, he was critical of his failure to clarify that the main contradiction was not between the Black working class and the middle class, but rather about the class contradictions of capitalism: “the exploitative policies and practices of the ruling capitalist class” (xl). Nevertheless, he warned that the “powerful and destructive role of class stratification within the Black community” should not be underestimated (xl). Today inequality within the Black population “has probably never been greater.”4
Manning also regretted his underestimation of the importance of electoral struggle to the Black freedom movement, citing the significance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the united front that elected Harold Washington in 1983 as the first Black, and most progressive, mayor of Chicago, as well as the Rainbow Coalition of the presidential campaign of 1984. However, he correctly identified and predicted the rise of such neoconservatives as Charles Hamilton, Tony Brown, and later Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell, anticipating the emergence of the “deracialization of U.S. politics,” which in the 2000 preface he termed “post-Black politics” (xxxvi). Moreover, despite the election of President Barack Obama, in the last few years, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and restrictions placed on voter registration by the right wing have eliminated several previously Black districts. Post-racialism, the view that the civil rights movement has done away with racism and that the playing field is now level—one indicator being the election of President Obama in 2008—has become a pervasive worldview among Euro-Americans.5 Based on this hegemonic ideology, Congress and the Supreme Court have actively pursued rolling back many of the measures gained in the civil rights period. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act,6 striking down a key provision initially aimed at prohibiting the pervasive practices that placed obstacles in the path of African Americans attempting to exercise their right to vote (Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al.). Furthermore, with the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee removing the ban on corporations using their funds for contributions to political parties and individuals, big money now plays an even more significant role in U.S. elections.7
The central point of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America—that race is a relationship between accumulation and dispossession and that without a structural change in the economic system, disparities and discrimination would continue and perhaps worsen—correctly anticipated and analyzed current conditions. Most social indicators demonstrate that structural racism continues to flourish. During the decades following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African Americans made significant gains. Political participation blossomed with respect to “dramatic” increases in voter participation and an exponential increase in the number of Black elected officials.8 The Black middle class experienced “a considerable expansion in the size, security . . . and influence.”9 The percentage of Blacks with college degrees rose from 3.5 to 14.3 percent, and the percentage of Blacks over the age of twenty-five with high-school degrees tripled.10
However, though individual African Americans have been able to overcome some impediments to opportunities, structural racism and white privilege continue to result in significant disparities and inequalities, exacerbated by the periodic economic downturns of the last fifteen years. By 2012, Black median household income had fallen to 58.4 percent of white median household income, compared to 66.3 percent in 2000.11 In 2013, the median white family had net assets of $142,000 as compared to $11,000 for the median Black family.12 Correspondingly, though the poverty rate among African Americans fell from 41.8 percent in 1965 to 22.5 percent in 2000, by 2014 it had risen to 27.2 percent.13 Studies continue to demonstrate a persistent gap in socioeconomic status between Blacks and whites.14 Contributing to these disparities is the fact that because of nondiscrimination policies and unionization, Blacks are more likely to hold jobs in the public sector. They therefore suffer disproportionately from the decline in the public sector brought about by the universal downsizing of government (though the private sector has improved since the 2008 recession).15 In addition, real estate foreclosure rates are three times higher in Black and Latino neighborhoods, where financial institutions profited from extending subprime loans disproportionately, than in white neighborhoods.16
Perhaps nowhere is the brutality of the capitalist state with respect to Black Americans more harshly visible than in the mass incarceration of Black and brown people. In 1985, Manning was among the first historians to sound the alarm about mass incarceration. In chapter 4 of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, entitled “Black Prisoners and Punishment in a Racist/Capitalist State,” he asserts, “At the core of the capitalist accumulation process and institutional racism is coercion” (94). Tracing the history of the use of punishment and violence to ensure the preservation of the capitalist state, he recounts in detail the sequence of coercive racial projects, beginning with slavery, “coercion of the most primitive kind;” through a series of Black codes to guarantee labor submission; peonage systems, and convict leasing, in which Black prisoners multiplied the profitability of the system; to Jim Crow laws, all held in place by lynching and other forms of racist violence (94). In 1983, he noted that “over 500,000 men, women and youths were incarcerated in more than 6,500 penal institutions of various types,” and that these were disproportionately Black (112). By the 2000 edition, he observed that there were more that 1.8 million Americans were incarcerated in the United States, about one-half of whom were African Americans (xliv).
Manning’s prediction of the growth of mass incarceration, where prisons would be among “fastest and most productive ‘growth industries,’” was unfortunately accurate (xlv). Currently there are 2.2 million Americans, disproportionately Black and Latino, incarcerated in state and federal prisons, with more than half of the prison population incarcerated for nonviolent crimes.17 With the highest rate of incarceration in the world, the United States is a carceral state with an orientation to governance that revolves around punishment. This mass incarceration is severely racialized, with over 60 percent of the incarcerated Black and Latino, leading some scholars to refer to this phenomenon as “the New Jim Crow.”18 Between 1980 and 2000, the rate of Black incarceration in the United States tripled, with most of the convictions involving nonviolent drug offenses. One in nine Black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four is incarcerated, Black men are imprisoned at a rate of 6.4 times more than white men, and for Black women the rate is three times that of white women.19
The punitive, discriminatory nature of this mass incarceration is undeniable. Drug convictions (mainly low-level drug offenses) account for most of the increase in imprisonment. However, studies show that people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at similar rates. In fact, to the extent that there are significant differences between races, surveys suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.20 Nevertheless, in 2015 approximately 80 percent of people incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons and 60 percent of those in federal prisons are Black or Latino.21 The United States Sentencing Commission concluded that Black men are given sentences one-fifth longer than white men for committing the same crimes.22 For example, in Wisconsin, where African Americans constitute only 6 percent of the population, they are 37 percent of those in state prisons. In 2007, the Vera Institute of Justice began a study (just concluded) of the racial implications of the work of the Milwaukee Country District Attorney’s Office. The study demonstrated that prosecutors in Milwaukee declined to prosecute only 27 percent of Blacks arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, as compared to 41 percent of whites.23
Change in Violent and Property Crime and Inmate and Total Population, 1960–2008
John Schmitt, Kris Warner, and Sarika Gupta, “The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, June 2010 report, http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-high-budgetary-cost-of-incarceration. Authors’ analysis of FBI and BJS data.
The punitive character of this mass incarceration is evident in Figure 1, documenting the precipitous hyperincarceration following the Reagan era, even as crimes against property and violent crime declined. Another major concern should be the school-to-prison pipeline, in which young children are criminalized and then become trapped in the carceral system, providing further evidence of Manning’s conclusion that “the criminal justice system operates effectively as a conduit for enlarging the nonwhite prison population” (113).
The current state of mass incarceration in the United States clearly demonstrates Manning’s assertion that capitalism is preserved and reproduced on the backs of the Black community. As the lives of Black men, women, and children and the fabric of the Black community are destroyed, mass incarceration provides profit through the transfer of payments to private corporations for building prisons and supplying prison services, as well as the exploitation of prison labor. Beyond this, the expansion of prisons has been used to attempt to shore up capitalism, solving the problem of deindustrialization by creating jobs in small towns where manufacturing has disappeared—a process described by anthropologist Andrea Morrell as “the carceral reindustrialization of America.”24
Furthermore, mass incarceration strengthens the political system that undergirds the political foundation of the state. In the majority of states, prisoners are not permitted to vote and in several states former felons lose their right to vote after they are released. In New York, for example, such restrictions effectively remove a large voting population from nonwhite downstate communities. Yet, for purposes of political representation, prisoners are counted as residents in the counties where their prison is located, providing upstate counties—which are primarily white, Republican, conservative State Senate districts—with increased population for the purposes of state benefits and political representation. Not surprisingly, their representatives frequently take political positions and actions that are hostile to the communities from which the prisoners are drawn, promoting and encouraging ever higher levels of incarceration.25
In 2015, after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice of the Ferguson Police Department revealed that Blacks were disproportionately stopped for minor violations. It became clear that the town of Ferguson financed a significant proportion of its expenses through discriminatory arrests, fines, court costs, and convictions. The income from Ferguson’s discriminatory practices was second only to income from the sales tax.26 The inability to pay one parking ticket could multiply fines and result in jail sentences, leading Human Rights Watch to refer to this as a debtor’s prison.27 In one case, an African American woman who was unable to pay a fine for a parking ticket was arrested twice; though she made payments regularly on the original $151, she still owed $541 after more than seven years.28 These practices are not uncommon in some regions of the United States, bringing to mind Manning’s description of the peonage system in which, at the end of the harvest, Black farmers owed more to the white planter than their share of the crop could cover, providing recruits for the “dramatically” profitable convict-leasing system (98).
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Manning’s work resonated with those he wrote about in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. As he observed in the 2000 preface, the book was very popular with prisoners. He often received several letters a month from prisoners—every one of which he answered, often at length. After learning of his death, a number of prisoners wrote to me and others close to Manning. As one wrote to me on July 26, 2013, “Dear Professor Mullings, Your husband/his writings inspired, educated and motivated me greatly. I’m just an evil convict now but I’ve been labeled a “socio-politico activist” for 40+ of my 65 years. . . . I hope you are prevailing after losing such an amazing, life enriching human force such as Manning Marable.” A letter to Russell Rickford, one of Manning’s former students, written on September 16, 2014, reads: “Since my incarceration, I have read many of Professor Manning Marable’s books. Some of them I’ve read twice . . . many . . . of Professor Marable’s books captivated me. I am reading things I was totally unaware of . . . I was unaware of his passing and was profoundly affected. . . . My intention is to create a Men’s Study Group to discuss various topics in regards to our situation.” And in a letter to me on April 25, 2015, another prisoner wrote: “Prof. Marable has been a teacher for me, of sorts, from the grave. His work [has] truly been a blessing and purpose to improve myself as an African American male. . . . This is where the book How Capitalism came to mind. I had read the book 3 times and I still get choked up in the ‘Black Prisoner’ chapter.”
Written in the aftermath of the Miami rebellion of 1980, following the acquittal of white police who employed deadly force to subdue and arrest a Black man, part III of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is entitled “The Question of Genocide.” After meticulously recounting known killings and acts of violence against Black people, Manning warned that “the existence of random violence against Blacks and civil terrorism is no accidental phenomenon. It is a necessary element in the establishment of any future authoritarian or rightwing government” (220). Referring to Reaganomics, he observed that “the wave of random racist violence and ‘legal lynchings’ can be placed in perspective only in the light of . . . the socioeconomic instability within the white middle to upper classes” (248) and the “white working class anxiety which accompanies any basic restructuring of the economic order” (251).
Today, in the context of the growing insecurity of the “middle class,” we confront a more public presence of a militant right wing in the form of the Tea Party and other such organizations, as well as a wave of racially motivated attacks and hate crimes. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that after the election of Obama in 2008, the number of anti-Black hate crimes increased by 8 percent from 2,658 in 2007 to 2,876 in 2008. They caution that these numbers are underrepresented, as many of the incidents do not become part of the FBI database.29 While we have no way of knowing the actual number of Black people murdered by the police, the existence of new levels of technology, particularly the mobile phone, have made a wave of high-profile police murders of unarmed Black people visible, culminating in massive protests and urban rebellions in several major cities. According to USA Today, based on voluntary local police reports of justifiable homicide to the FBI, there were on average ninety-six cases of a white police officer killing a Black person each year between 2006 and 2012.30 An analysis by the Washington Post found that during the first five months of 2015, U.S. police shot and killed 385 people, at a rate of two to three people per day. Half of the victims were white and half minority; two-thirds of the unarmed victims were Black or Latino.31 Historian Robin D. G. Kelley noted that in the seven months between August and November 2014, while we waited for the grand jury that would find no probable cause in the police murder of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, at least seven unarmed African American men and women between the ages of twelve and thirty-seven were killed by police officers.32 This does not include killings by white vigilantes, such as George Zimmerman’s murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, who was on his way home after buying candy and soda at a 7-Eleven. Zimmerman was found not guilty on all counts. Nor does it include the murder of seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis by forty-seven-year-old Michael Dunn, for playing loud music. Nor is gender a protection, as we know from the murder of twenty-two-year-old Rekia Boyd by police officers in Chicago, or the death of Tanisha Anderson after being slammed to the ground by a Cleveland police officer, or the murder of nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride, who was shot in the face by homeowner Theodore Wafer when she knocked on his door to ask for help after an accident.33
At the close of chapter 9, Manning reflects on the question of genocide. Interrogating the use of the term, he notes that “genocide is usually defined as the systematic and deliberate destruction of a racial, political or cultural group,” and that to the extent that Blacks are needed as a reserve labor pool, they will be brutally treated but maintained “as a racially segregated entity for the systematic exploitation of its labor power” (225). But most important for our understanding of the current situation, he cautioned that in the effort to preserve capitalism at all costs, “The racist/capitalist state under Reagan has proceeded down a public policy road which could inevitably involve the complete obliteration of the entire Black reserve army of labor and sections of the Black working class” (225). In 1983, he ended the chapter on “Racist Violence in Late Capitalism” with the warning: “The genocidal logic of the situation could demand, in the not too distant future, the rejection of the ghetto’s right to survival in the new capitalist order. Without gas chambers or pogroms, the dark ghetto’s economic and social institutions might be destroyed, and many of its residents would simply cease to exist” (226).
This analysis helps to explain the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men” (see above) who “have disappeared from daily life.” In 1951, citing the many incidents of lynching, police brutality, and legal segregation, as well as systematic inequalities and discrimination, the singer Paul Robeson and activist William Patterson, supported by the Communist Party USA, presented a document to the United Nations, asserting that the United States was involved in genocide as defined by the United Nations.34 In May 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a scathing report condemning, among other things, the death penalty and racism, especially as they relate to police brutality and criminal justice in the United States.35 Perhaps it is time to revisit the issue of genocide.
Activist, Scholar, Teacher, and Mentor
Analyzing of these conditions led Manning to the conclusion that Black Americans could not achieve real freedom within the political economy of capitalism, requiring a significant transformation of society. Though he was critical of certain aspects of traditional Marxism, he took to heart Marx’s well-known observation that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”36 From the time he was seventeen years old and among the first mourners to arrive at the funeral for Dr. Martin Luther King, he firmly believed that his role was not only to describe and analyze the conditions of Black people but also to work to change them, unifying theory and practice through political activism and building institutions, as well as engaging in ideological struggle.
Not content to deal merely with the dissemination of knowledge, while he continued to produce both popular and scholarly writing, Manning’s role as an activist emerged logically from his analysis in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Here he presents “ten points of departure . . . which may provide some tentative suggestions for social transformation and the end to the ‘underdevelopment’ of Black America” (256). These considerations infused his work in many of the organizations in which we participated. He was involved in a variety of left organizations, including the National Black Political Assembly and the National Black Independent Political Party. He also served as a vice president for the Democratic Socialists of America and as cochair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
Finding that few of these organizations effectively addressed the current issues of Black people, he also helped to initiate a new organization. In 1995, at a meeting in Manchester, England, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Pan-African Congress, Manning and I met with historian Barbara Ransby and sociologist Abdul Alkalimat and discussed the need for an organization that would address the challenges confronting the African American community, which unfortunately in many ways continued to be similar to those Manning analyzed in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. A few months later, we met with activist Bill Fletcher around our kitchen table to launch the organization that became the Black Radical Congress. On March 1, 1997, thirty-five activists met in Chicago to discuss the conditions of African Americans and the future of progressive U.S. politics. As we introduced the concept to activists all over the country, the coordinating committee grew to two hundred African Americans—with various political perspectives—ranging from nationalists to lesbian and gay activists, feminists, and communists. Manning wrote the first draft of the “Freedom Agenda,” which called for
the human rights of Black people and all people . . . [and] a society and world in which every individual enjoys full human rights, full protection of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and in the United States equal protection of the Constitution and of all the laws. We seek a society in which every individual—regardless of color, nationality, national origin ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, family structure, or mental and physical ability—is free to experience “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”37
The demands included the right to shelter, employment, health care, and education, and declared: “We will fight to advance beyond capitalism, which has demonstrated its structural incapacity to address basic human needs worldwide and, in particular, the needs of Black people.”38
The founding conference of the Black Radical Congress (BRC), named in honor of the African National Congress, in Chicago, June 19 to 21, 1998, attracted more than two thousand African American activists. Though, like the Niagara Movement, the BRC was relatively short-lived (ten years), it could boast of some important accomplishments, perhaps chief among them bringing together African Americans from across the political spectrum who would subsequently work together on political projects. The national organization adopted such campaigns such as “Books Not Bars,” an anti-incarceration, pro-education movement, and raised money and arranged speaking engagements for the Charleston Five, longshoremen who faced felony riot charges arising from attempts to unionize dockworkers. Local committees also undertook projects such as working with a coalition that successfully defeated the Edison Foundation’s attempt to privatize New York City public schools.
Throughout this work, it was clear that there was another front to the struggle. Manning was among the foremost Black scholars to speak forcefully about the ways in which patriarchy supports “the ideological and coercive apparatuses of white power” (9) and the importance of fighting sexism. In “Groundings with My Sisters,” chapter 3 of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, he condemns patriarchy in Black organizations in no uncertain terms and unequivocally supports the leadership of women. He observes that “Black social history, as it has been written to date, has been profoundly patriarchal” (62). Reviewing the “triple oppression (race/class/sex) of Black women,” he described the leadership of Black women from the time of Sojourner Truth through the civil rights movement, concluding that “no road toward the ultimate emancipation of the U.S. Black working class exists outside of a concomitant struggle, in theory and practice, to destroy every vestige of sexual oppression within the Black community” (91). His prescient observation that “women have been the foundation of Black culture and society, yet their contributions have been ignored” (103) foreshadowed the current discussions around leadership and the emergence of young Black women as leaders of new organizations that are at the forefront of confronting police brutality and state violence.
Manning often joked about the fact that his family, with whom he often spent the summers of his youth, was from Tuskegee, Alabama, the home of Booker T. Washington. Though he disagreed with Washington’s political views and his opposition to W. E. B. Du Bois, he did agree with Washington about the importance of building Black institutions. He established and molded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. It was to be a center that would not only engage in critical scholarship—it became one of the best-respected Black Studies programs in the country—but also produce work that was both useful and accessible to residents of the Black community, with the hope that activists would be empowered by knowledge that could contribute to social transformation. To this end, he also lectured widely to grassroots organizations, community groups, and prisoners, as well as to academics.
During the years Manning directed the institute, he sought to bridge the gap between Columbia and the Harlem community. Institute conversations, symposia, and conferences were open to the public. Community voices were heard. He worked with students, community activists, and organizations, as well as established scholars, to produce conferences and symposia on topics such as youth, feminism, incarceration, hip-hop, and Black studies. (See Souls 2004 for a discussion of the many projects the institute developed.)
He also initiated conferences about other areas of the African diaspora, such as Jamaica, Cuba, and South Africa. Coming of age at a time when “third world” countries and anti-imperialist movements were attuned to various versions of Marxism and anti-imperialism as an alternative to “modernization theory,” which blamed these nations for their underdevelopment, the importance of internationalism infused his work. As an undergraduate at Earlham College he spent time in Kenya, and despite being prohibited from entering South Africa by the apartheid government, he wrote his dissertation on John Langalibalele Dube, one of the founders of the African Nationalist Congress. Throughout How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning contextualizes the Black freedom struggle within broader mobilizations against imperialism, reflecting the influence of Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Rodney. African and Caribbean Politics, written in 1987, remains one of his most popular books.
Together we visited Cuba, South Africa, Tanzania, Jamaica, and Brazil, among other countries. Both of us were invited to speak at the Non-Governmental Organization Forum of the United Nations Conference on Racism, Xenophobia and Other Forms of Intolerance in Durban, South Africa. We were tremendously impressed and hopeful about the possibility of addressing “global apartheid.”39 Manning, who had been involved in public debates and discussions about reparations, including one published by TIME,40 was particularly interested in the international outcome of these discussions. However, not surprisingly, the representatives from the United States and Israel walked out of the conference. We arrived home two days before 9/11 and the expansion of the security state, which, along with the protests of the United States and Israel, muted discussion of reparations for slavery and generations of racism.
Manning was also the founding editor of the quarterly journal Souls: A Journal of Black History, Politics and Culture (formerly Race and Reason). This too was a forum that encouraged scholars to address the critical issues confronting the Black community, reflecting and interrogating many of the issues raised in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and exploring new ones. It was one of the few journals that welcomed scholars whose work took an openly critical stance on a range of issues affecting Black people. Theme issues examined such subjects as gender and sexuality, new social movements in the African diaspora, public education, Malcolm X, Hurricane Katrina, Islam and Black Americans, Black Power, and many others. Though the journal presented first-rate scholarship, it was also a site where young scholars could be nurtured and encouraged and learn the skills of building and maintaining institutions. The managing editor of Souls was generally one of Manning’s students; the editorial board included several of our students and former students, who were also contributors to the journal. The two readers for each submission diligently tried their best to provide supportive advice that would help each potential writer to learn the skills of writing for journals, and it was in Souls that many young people who are now established scholars published their early work. Always coediting with young scholars, Manning collated some of the articles into ten volumes to be used in studies of Black history, foregrounding their work in ways that are unusual in the academy.
Though seldom interacting with a computer and generally writing voluminously on yellow pads, Manning believed in using every effective vehicle to disseminate knowledge. In collaboration with Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, he initiated in several digital projects,41 including The Souls of Black Folk, a multimedia web-based annotated guide, the Amistad Project, to help teachers with Black history, and the Malcolm X Multimedia Study Environment (MSE).
In addition, Manning was a much beloved teacher and mentor. Through his teaching, the institute, and the publication of Souls, as one of his former students put it, he “cultivated two generations of scholars, activists, and students, discovering in each individual a unique genius for advancing the cause he lovingly described: empowering the Black masses to reclaim their agency and ‘return to their own history.’”42 He would have been very proud of his intellectual sons and daughters who have taken up the challenges outlined in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America.
Though Manning acted on his belief that there was no contradiction between activism and scholarship, his first love was writing. He was a prolific writer (as was clear in his 2000 reassessment, where he admitted that he wrote more than one-third of the book in four weeks of fourteen hours a day [xxxviii]). He was never happier than when he sat down with a blank yellow pad and, by the end of the day, the pages were covered with words. As was clearly the case with How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, he profoundly believed that those of us who have the opportunity to engage in knowledge production have the responsibility to use this to empower people. For many years, he wrote a weekly column about current events, first entitled “From the Grassroots,” then “Beyond the Color Line.” At the height of its distribution, the column was provided free of charge to more than four hundred Black and international newspapers. He wrote hundreds of articles and authored and edited more than thirty books on various subjects, including: Race, Reform and Rebellion (1999),43 Black Leadership (1998),44 African and Caribbean Politics (1987),45 Speaking Truth to Power (1996),46 Living Black History (2006),47 and biographical works about Du Bois (1986)48 and Medgar Evers (coedited with Myrlie Evers) (2005),49 and, of course, Malcolm X (2011). Among them was the widely used text in Black studies, Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal (2000 and 2009), which I coedited. We compiled a history of texts indicating the thinking and philosophy of Black women and men, leaders, and common people, including the more traditionally known integrationists and nationalists but also excavating the history of what we called transformationalism—the view that eradicating racism required a radical transformative social change addressing all forms of inequality. The selections in this text, as well as the images in our book Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle (2001), reflected our shared vision of history as made by collective actions, by ordinary people doing extraordinary things, by African Americans “making themselves.”
But Manning’s most prominent book is the Pulitzer Prize–winning Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. His interest in Malcolm X emerged early in his career. In How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning described Malcolm X as “the greatest Black revolutionary of the 1960s” and notes that in the construction of “a socialist America,” the “other America” of Malcolm X, among others, must be the “historical starting point” for our fresh efforts to build “a genuine peoples’ democracy and a socialist economic system” (230). Malcolm X had intrigued him for years and when Manning stepped down from directing the institute, he was able to devote his full attention to writing Malcolm’s biography. He began to collect material about Malcolm X in 1989 while on the faculty at the University of Colorado and became fascinated by the inconsistencies and silences in the Autobiography of Malcolm X. (After all, all autobiographies highlight certain aspects of one’s life and underplay others.) Ever a public historian who believed that “democratic access and multiple perspectives contribute to the making of the past as well as the present,”50 he created an interactive digital repository, designed to analyze the Autobiography through various lenses, such as politics and religion. Launched in 2004, it included a chronology, annotations, course syllabi, lectures, interviews, oral histories, and other material, all of which are available for public use.
Manning was an assiduous and meticulous researcher. Working with his students, he took joy in creating an exhaustive chronology and scouring the records of the New York City Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request. He collected and analyzed vast quantities of archival material, including periodicals from all over the world and interviewed dozens of people, always triangulating his sources.
As he wrote, he was particularly appalled by the fact that neither Malcolm X nor his wife, Betty Shabazz, had any way of knowing the extent of the forces arrayed against them. As a historian, writing years after the fact, Manning was able to present a context that neither Malcolm nor Betty could fully know, including the scope of the New York Police Department and FBI surveillance, the disruption and infiltration of Malcolm’s organizations, and his betrayal by some of his closest associates.
Manning was obsessed with the unresolved questions surrounding the assassination of Malcolm X. On one hand, there was the official interpretation. But he focused on difficult and unanswered questions: Who gave the order and who pulled the trigger? What was the role of law enforcement agencies such as the New York Police Department Bureau of Special Service and Investigation (BOSSI) unit and the FBI? Did they have advance knowledge of the assassination and, if so, what did they do about it? Who was the shadowy figure whisked away from the Audubon Ballroom in a police car the night of the assassination? The evidence led him to suspect that the person who fired the shot that murdered Malcolm X had not been jailed, tried, or convicted for the crime. His hope was that the biography would contribute to raising the demand that the FBI and NYPD fully open their files on the assassination of Malcolm X.
In keeping with his internationalist interest, Manning excitedly pored over the unedited version of Malcolm’s diaries recounting his trip to Africa. He discovered that Malcolm met and developed alliances with prominent world leaders and revolutionaries and that he was frequently received with the pomp and ceremony of a head of state. Equally interesting to Manning was Malcolm’s spiritual journey and his move in the direction of anti-imperialism and international human rights. For Manning, Malcolm X became a global force, with the potential, had he lived, of becoming a bridge to the more than one billion Muslims in the world.
As was the case in writing How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning was guided by the words of Amílcar Cabral, the assassinated leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde: “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. . . . Mask no difficulties, mistakes and failures. Claim no easy victories.”51 Hence Manning’s objective in the biography was “to go beyond the legend” and to present Malcolm as a real, complex human being who confronted enormous personal, ideological, and political struggles, who made mistakes, but reflected on them and tried to correct them, and thus emerged as a historic figure who “embodied the spirit, vitality and political mood of an entire population.”52 He wrote: “I am deeply grateful to the real Malcolm X, the man behind the myth, who courageously challenged and transformed himself, seeking to achieve a vision of a world without racism. Without erasing his mistakes and contradictions, Malcolm embodies a definitive yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership should be measured.”53
For Manning, the biography was merely the beginning of an inquiry that would ignite debates and further investigation. He looked forward to collegial discussion and contestation, building on, extending, and interrogating some of the issues raised in the biography. He would have relished discussions with those whose goal was to advance our knowledge and would have been amused by those whose motivations, intentions, and behavior were far less noble. Unfortunately, he did not live to participate in these exchanges.
For twenty-five years, Manning battled sarcoidosis, a disease that over the years destroyed his lung capacity. Eventually, he had to use an oxygen tank in order to breathe. He did not allow this to constrain his teaching and writing (though he was forced to curtail his lecture schedule). He carried his oxygen tank to classes and meetings with students. Even when limited to his desk by the increasing need for oxygen, he maintained his eternal optimism and continued his work. In July 2010, he underwent a double lung transplant. After his release from the hospital in August, we hoped that he would live somewhere near three years (the average life expectancy for a double lung-transplant patient at the hospital where he underwent the procedure). He continued his research, writing, and editing, determined to finish the biography. In March 2011, he contracted pneumonia as a result of a medication being withdrawn. As always, he battled for his life with all his energy. As he emerged from an induced coma, I looked forward to seeing him and talking with him the next day. However, as a resident was changing a tube, Manning went into cardiac arrest, from which he never recovered. His untimely and unnecessary death occurred on April 1, 2011. The biography of Malcolm X was officially published on April 4.
The Vision
Based on extensive research, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America was incredibly prescient about the status of Black people today and its historic causes. However, Manning went beyond cataloguing the ills of capitalism to elaborate what could and should be done. He engaged not only in political critique but in thinking about a way forward.54 As he put it, “The road to Black liberation must also be a road to socialist revolution” (228). In 2002, he noted that, in view of world events and capitalism’s ability to mutate, “socialism might seem to have reached a dead end as a viable concept” (xlv). But, he added, “History is always filled with unanticipated twists and detours” (xlv).
Indeed, inequality both in the United States and throughout the world is greater than it has ever been, with a massive transfer of wealth to the 0.01 percent.55 As the consequences of neoliberalism—market fundamentalism, structural adjustment, and the decline of the welfare state—become widespread, the influence of U.S. capitalism has been in decline. Popular protest in some Latin American and European countries have resulted in the election of left governments that have challenged the current world order. A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 60 percent of Americans think that the government should do something to reduce inequality.56 Reflecting on the recent recession of 2008 to 2009, some scholars have suggested that “globalized capitalism has so socialized the forces of production and the financial system (and on such a vast scale) that even the enormous resources of the largest capitalist economy in the world are insufficient to rescue it.”57
But as Manning notes, “Wherever there is repression, there will be resistance, and from the lessons of struggle will flower the hopes for a better life” (xlvi). Today we see that though capitalism and racism have persisted and, in some ways, become stronger and more repressive as the crisis of capitalism has deepened, so have protests against it. Despite the rise of the right wing and increasing state violence, as predicted in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, the Occupy movement, for example, has helped to bring the unprecedented inequality to public view. Young African American women have organized mass mobilizations and major demonstrations, often dominated by young people of various races and ethnicities, to confront and protest state violence and mass incarceration. These recent actions, as well as long-term organizing, are forcing some transformations in policing and incarceration. New York State’s Rockefeller drug laws, with their extremely discriminatory application and mandatory harsh prison sentences, have been weakened. In New York City, a U.S. district court judge ruled that “stop-and-frisk,” long a staple of the New York City Police Department’s discriminatory policing, is unconstitutional. A small number of police officers have been charged (though not convicted) for the death of a Black man while under arrest in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Justice Department has initiated at least twenty investigations of the conduct of police departments and officers.58
In How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning advocates “socialism from below”—a democratic and popular multicultural society. For Manning, revolution had a moral component. However, he was not naive about the obstacles in the way of a just society. He advanced a program about how this might be accomplished, observing that “history is an organic process” and that “the transition to socialism will not be fixed or predetermined,” but will require a coalition of progressive forces and transitional reformist demands that are antiracist, antisexist, and anticapitalist, which would then be the foundation for an alternative social system (232–33). In 2000, he concluded, “I remain convinced that Black people as a group will never achieve the historical objectives of their long struggle within the political economy of capitalism. . . . The oppressed have in their hands the capacity to make new history and, ultimately, a new society. This is the political perspective taken by How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, and it is the position in which I still passionately believe today” (xlvi).
New York City
June 2015
Acknowledgements: I am most grateful to the friends, colleagues, and former students who were so supportive through this project. This volume would not have come into being without Anthony Arnove, whose vision, patience, and commitment to reissuing How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America was the driving force in bringing this about. Raymond Codrington, Dana Davis, Garrett Felber, Bill Fletcher, Gerald Horne, Megan Marcelin, Sandra Mullings, and Alia Tyner all read drafts of the manuscript at various stages and provided useful and supportive comments. Many of their observations are included here. Finally, it would have been difficult to complete the foreword without the research skills and conscientious attentiveness of my research assistant, Lisa Figuero Jahn. Thank you.