Judith Stein, the history professor who wrote "authoritative books about the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and the impact of politics on the American economy," as the New York Times put it, died last Monday. She was 77.
A professor of history at the City College of New York for more than 50 years, Stein wrote The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society, which appeared in 1986, and "broke ground by placing Garvey--the Jamaican-born founder of the New York-based Universal Negro Improvement Association--and his early-20th-century back-to-Africa movement in the broader perspective of global black politics and economic conditions during and after World War I."
Her other books were Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism and Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies.
Author and Columbia University historian Eric Foner commented about Stein: "Unlike many on the left, she offered, before it was common, a critique of liberal Democratic politics as setting the stage for the turn to the right." She attributed a decline in traditional liberalism to a policy that placed Wall Street ahead of factory workers.