Martin Bernal, ‘Black Athena’ Scholar, Dies at 76

The cause was complications of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disorder, said his wife, Leslie Miller-Bernal. “Black Athena” opened a new front in the warfare over cultural diversity already raging on American campuses in the 1980s and ’90s. The first volume, published in 1987 — the same year as “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom’s attack on efforts to diversify the academic canon — made Mr. Bernal a hero among Afrocentrists, a pariah among conservative scholars and

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