Voorhees College

Voorhees announces commencement speaker

April 28, 2009

An historian, social theorist and political activist for more than three decades, Dr. Manning Marable will be the commencement speaker, which will take place Saturday, May 9, at 11 a.m. in the Leonard E. Dawson Health and Human Resources Center.

Marable is currently the M. Moran professor of public affairs, political science and history and director of the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University in New York City.
He was the founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003. Under his leadership, the institute became one of the nation’s most respected African American Studies programs in the country.

Since receiving his Ph.D. in American history at the University of Maryland-College Park, Marable has been a major architect of outstanding African American Studies and interdisciplinary studies for university programs. In the early 1980s, he reestablished Fisk University’s historic Race Relations Institute, founded originally in 1944 by sociologist Charles S. Johnson, and from 1983 to 1986, Marable was the founding director of Colgate University’s Africana and Latin American Studies Program. From 1987 to 1989, Marable headed Ohio State University’s Black Studies Department, then the largest program of its kind in the country.

A prolific writer, Marable has produced 15 books, 13 edited volumes and more than 400 articles in academic journals, encyclopedias and related publications. Some of his major works include “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America,” “Beyond Black and White,” which received a Book of the Year honor by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights, “Black Leadership,” “The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life,” and “The Autobiography of Medgar Evers,” which was co-edited with Myrlie Evers-Williams and earned Marable an NAACP Image Award nomination.

Marable is a frequent commentator on public policy issues and on U.S. racial history for media outlets such as CNN, the History Channel, PBS, The Today Show, “Tavis Smiley,” BET, The Charlie Rose Show, BBC and Al Jazeera. He devotes time speaking throughout America on behalf of labor, civil rights, prisoners’ rights and social justice groups.

For more information on commencement, please contact Teesa Johnson Brunson, director of communications, at 803-780-1194 or at tbrunson@voorhees.edu.