Malik Simba, PhD

Meet the Scholar

Malik Simba, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of History and Africana Studies, California State University, Fresno

About the Scholar

“The dialectics of history is driven by race, class, gender, age, and ethnicity. The ideas of equality, individualism, justice, and the rule of law encases the dialectics of history. In the United States, these variables are driven by the contradiction between what Gunnar Myrdal says is the strife between the ideas of freedom versus equality and Jim Crow and it’s legacy of Racism.” *

I obtained my Ph.D. in the History of African Peoples and American Constitutional History. With this training, I became knowledgeable of the complex history of race relations both globally and nationally. I was actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement in southern Colorado. I formed the Black Action Association (BAA) in Pueblo, Colorado and that organization helped to desegregate parts of the city. While at Southern Colorado State University at Pueblo, I helped the BAA to create an outreach in the state prison to tutor inmates and help them attain their GED. However, while at the University, I was indicted by federal authorities for inciting campus disorder. A trial concluded with the dismissal of all charges for me and a number of co-defendants. My doctoral training was at the University of Minnesota. The Twin Cities was a very diverse urban setting. Like my hometown of Denver, Colorado, I interacted with many interracial marriages and social groups of ethnically diverse heritages. I came of age interacting with people of many faiths–Catholic, Christian, Jews, and so forth. These experiences and more have helped me teach students about the social complexities of the nation’s social conditions.

*See G. Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1962).

Works by the Scholar

Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism: An Interpretive History from Colonial Background to the Great Depression. 1^st ed., Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2010.

Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism: An Interpretive History from Colonial Background to the Great Depression, 2nd ed., Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2013.

Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism: From the Colonial Background through the Ascendancy of Barack Obama and the Dilemma of Black Lives Matter. 3^rd ed., Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2016.

Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism: From the Colonial Background through the Ascendancy of Barack Obama and the Dilemma of Black Lives Matter. 4^th ed., Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2019.

I have also published the definitive history of Gong Lum v. Rice, which explains the history of the importation of Chinese labor into Mississippi after the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow education. I have also published numerous essays in various encyclopedias such as World Slavery, Civil Rights, Slave Resistance and Rebellion, Malcolm X, and many more. I have published in the Ninth Circuit Court Journal, Focus of Law Studies, Chicago Tribune, Western Legal History, and many other similar types of periodicals. l served on the Advisory Board of the digital website Blackpast.org, which is the Google of the global and national Black experience. Last year, the website had six million visitors from 170 nations.