William Manning Marable (May 13, 1950 – April 1, 2011)[1] was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University.

For him, the two vocations were inseparable... ...when he became the founding director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) a few years earlier, he'd envisioned it as fundamentally a community resource.

In 1979, Marable joined the New American Movement (NAM), an organization of veterans of the New Left who were trying to build a successor to Students for a Democratic Society.

He left the DSA in 1985 after Michael Harrington and his allies, following the lead of much of the mainstream union leadership, refused to back Jesse Jackson’s insurgent campaign in 1984.

[11] Marable was also a member of the New York Legislature's Amistad Commission, created to review state curriculum regarding the slave trade.

It gave them a sense of ethnic superiority and cultural originality, without requiring the hard, critical study of historical realities.

It was, in short, only the latest theoretical construct of a politics of racial identity, a world-view designed to discuss the world but never really to change it.It was reported in June 2004 by activist group Racism Watch that Marable had called for immediate action to be taken to end the U.S. military's use of Raphael Patai's book The Arab Mind, which Marable described as "a book full of racially charged stereotypes and generalizations.

[21] It was one of three nominees for the inaugural Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction (2012) presented by the American Library Association for the best adult non-fiction.