Nathan Hare
Encyclopedia
Nathan Hare was the first person hired to coordinate a black studies
program in the United States, at San Francisco State University
in 1968.
on April 9, 1933. He attended the public schools of L’Ouverture (variously spelled "Louverture") Elementary School and L'Ouverture High School. The two schools were named after the militant Haitian General Toussaint Louverture and were part of the so-called “Slick Separate Schools” in the segregated rural milieu of the late 1930s and 1940s.
When Hare was eleven years old, his family migrated to San Diego, California, where his single mother took a civilian janitorial job with the Navy air station. As World War II
ended and his mother was laid off, his family returned to Oklahoma. This put on hold his ambition to become a professional boxer, something he had picked up after adult neighbors in San Diego assured him that writers all starve to death.
The direction of his life would change again when his English teacher at L'Ouverture High (later closed after the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court desegregaton decree, through consolidation into the all-white Slick High School, itself now also closed by consolidation) administered standardized tests to her ninth grade class in English Composition in the search for someone to represent the class at the annual statewide "Interscholastic Meet" of the black students held annually at Oklahoma’s Langston University
. Hare represented L'Ouverture and won first prize with more prizes to come in ensuing years; and on that basis the L’Ouverture principal persuaded him to go to college after getting him a fulltime job working in the Langston University Dining Hall to pay his way. By his junior year Hare had moved up in his student employment to Dormitory Proctor of the University Men and Freshman Tutor in his senior year.
When Hare enrolled at Langston University (now only "historically black"), Langston was the only college Black students could attend in the state of Oklahoma. Named for John Mercer Langston
, the first Black individual elected to public office in the United States, the town was a product of the late nineteenth century black nationalist movement’s attempt to make the Oklahoma Territory an all-Black state. In fact, Langston, Oklahoma
laid claim to being the first all-black town established in the United States. One of Hare’s professors, the poet Melvin B. Tolson
, was mayor of the town for four terms, was named poet laureate of Liberia, and eventually his spectacular style of teaching would be portrayed in "The Great Debaters
." Graduating from Langston with an AB in Sociology, Hare won a Danforth fellowship to continue his education and obtained an MA (1957) and PhD in Sociology (1962) from the University of Chicago
. Hare received another PhD in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology
in San Francisco, California (1975).
. Hare had just been dismissed from a six-year stint as a sociology professor at Howard University
, after he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, The Hilltop
, in which he mocked Howard president James Nabrit’s plan (announced in the Washington Post on September 6, 1966) to make Howard “sixty per cent white by 1970.” James Nabrit
had been one of the civil rights attorneys who successfully argued the 1954 “Brown vs. Board of Education” case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The “Black Power” cry had been issued just two month’s earlier by one of Hare’s former Howard students, Stokely Carmichael
(another of Hare’s students at Howard was Claude Brown
, author of Manchild in the Promised Land). Hare had taught sociology at Howard since 1961, the year before he obtained the Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
On February 22, 1967, Hare stood at press conference, with a group of students calling themselves “The Black Power Committee,” and read “The Black University Manifesto,” which Hare had written with the input of the Black Power Committee. The manifesto expressly called for “the overthrow of the Negro college with white innards and to raise in its place a black university, relevant to the black community and its needs." Hare had previously published a book called The Black Anglo Saxons and coined the phrase “The Ebony Tower” to characterize Howard University.
In the spring of 1967, he invited Muhammad Ali
to speak at Howard and introduced him when the controversial heavyweight champion gave his popular “Black Is Best” speech to an impromptu crowd of 4,000 gathered at a moment’s notice outside the university’s Frederick Douglass Hall after the administration padlocked the Crampton Auditorium in the days leading up to Ali’s refusal of his military draft. Following Hare’s dismissal that June, he briefly resumed his own aborted professional boxing efforts, winning his last fight by a knockout in the first round in the Washington Coliseum on December 5, 1967.
At San Francisco State, where the Black Student Union demanded an “autonomous Department of Black Studies,” Hare was soon involved in a five-month strike for black studies led by The Black Student Union, backed by the Third World Liberation Front and the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. Black, white, and Third World students and professors participated in the strike, which also included community leaders and the Black Faculty Union, headed by Hare. The late actor, Mel Stewart
was a member of the Black Faculty Unon, but Hare was the only faculty member invited to become a "quasi-member" of the Central Committee of the Black Student Union, which included a student named Danny Glover
, who would go on to become a successful Hollywood actor. One of the speakers almost daily at the noonday rallies of the strike was Ronald Dellums, who was later elected to the U.S. Congress and later Mayor of Oakland, California.
After one San Francisco State College president (the late John Summerskill) was fired and another (Robert Smith) resigned, Smith was replaced by the general semanticist S.I. Hayakawa (who would later become a U.S. Senator). Hayakawa used a hard-line strategy to put down the five-month strike, declaring “martial law” and arresting a crowd of five hundred and fifty-seven rallying professors and students (the overwhelming majority of them white). Weeks later, on February 28, 1969, Hayakawa dismissed Dr. Nathan Hare as chairman of the newly formed black studies department, the first in the United States,“to become effective June 1, 1969.” Hare stayed on until June at the request of the Black Student Union and remained for many more months in an unofficial capacity of “Chairman in Exile.”
Hare then teamed with Robert Chrisman and the late Allen Ross (a white printer and small businessman in Sausalito who had immigrated from Russia
) to become the founding publisher of “The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research” in November 1969. The New York Times
would soon call The Black Scholar “the most important journal devoted to black issues since ‘The Crisis
.'” Ten years earlier, in 1959, Hare had briefly been a clerical assistant to the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies
then being edited by Andrew Hacker, a white history professor at Northwestern University
, where Hare developed a dream of someday editing a “Journal of Negro Studies” ("Negro" was the word still in fashion for blacks in 1959). In 1968, during a break in a television panel including Nathan Glazer
, co-author of The Lonely Crowd, Glazer wrote a note to Hare on a white index card saying "Needed: a Black Scholar journal." Before starting The Black Scholar, Hare had written and published articles in magazines and periodicals that included: Ebony
, Negro Digest, Black World, Phylon Review, Social Forces, Social Education, Newsweek
, and The Times
.
After leaving The Black Scholar in 1975, in a dispute over the changing direction of the journal, and obtaining a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco, Nathan Hare began the private practice of psychotherapy, with offices in San Francisco and Oakland. He also focused on forming a movement for “A Better Black Family” (the title of a popular speaking out editorial he wrote for the February 1976 issue of Ebony magazine) shortly after completing a dissertation on “Black Male/Female Relations” at the California School of Professional Psychology.
By 1979, in collaboration with his wife (Dr. Julia Hare, author of How to Find and Keep a BMW (Black Man Working), Hare formed The Black Think Tank, which published the journal of “Black Male/Female Relationships” for several years. After the journal folded, Hare went into the full-time practice of psychology and the development of the Black Think Tank. In 1985, a small book written by him and his wife ("Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood") was disseminated by The Black Think Tank, issuing the call and becoming the catalyst for the contemporary rites of passage movement for African-American boys that emerged as the Hares lectured and spread the idea of the rites of passage for black boys throughout the United States.
to Newsweek
, Saturday Review and The Times
, Nathan Hare is the author of several books:
Books in collaboration with his wife, Julia Hare (the former radio talk show host and television guest, who also is a graduate of Langston University) have been published and widely distributed by The Black Think Tank, headquartered in San Francisco. They include:
While publisher of The Black Scholar from 1969–75, Nathan Hare co-edied two books with Robert Chrisman:
African American studies
African American studies is a subset of Black studies or Africana studies. It is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of the history, culture, and politics of African Americans...
program in the United States, at San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...
in 1968.
Early life and education
Hare was born on a sharecropper’s farm near the Creek County town of Slick, OklahomaSlick, Oklahoma
Slick is a town in Creek County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 148 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Slick is located at .According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of , all of it land.-Demographics:...
on April 9, 1933. He attended the public schools of L’Ouverture (variously spelled "Louverture") Elementary School and L'Ouverture High School. The two schools were named after the militant Haitian General Toussaint Louverture and were part of the so-called “Slick Separate Schools” in the segregated rural milieu of the late 1930s and 1940s.
When Hare was eleven years old, his family migrated to San Diego, California, where his single mother took a civilian janitorial job with the Navy air station. As World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
ended and his mother was laid off, his family returned to Oklahoma. This put on hold his ambition to become a professional boxer, something he had picked up after adult neighbors in San Diego assured him that writers all starve to death.
The direction of his life would change again when his English teacher at L'Ouverture High (later closed after the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court desegregaton decree, through consolidation into the all-white Slick High School, itself now also closed by consolidation) administered standardized tests to her ninth grade class in English Composition in the search for someone to represent the class at the annual statewide "Interscholastic Meet" of the black students held annually at Oklahoma’s Langston University
Langston University
Langston University is an institution of higher learning located in Langston, Oklahoma, USA. It is the only historically black college in the state, and the westernmost historically black college in the United States...
. Hare represented L'Ouverture and won first prize with more prizes to come in ensuing years; and on that basis the L’Ouverture principal persuaded him to go to college after getting him a fulltime job working in the Langston University Dining Hall to pay his way. By his junior year Hare had moved up in his student employment to Dormitory Proctor of the University Men and Freshman Tutor in his senior year.
When Hare enrolled at Langston University (now only "historically black"), Langston was the only college Black students could attend in the state of Oklahoma. Named for John Mercer Langston
John Mercer Langston
John Mercer Langston was an American abolitionist, attorney, educator, and political activist. He was the first dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University. In 1888 he was the first African...
, the first Black individual elected to public office in the United States, the town was a product of the late nineteenth century black nationalist movement’s attempt to make the Oklahoma Territory an all-Black state. In fact, Langston, Oklahoma
Langston, Oklahoma
Langston is a town in Logan County, Oklahoma, United States, and is part of the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 1,670 at the 2000 census...
laid claim to being the first all-black town established in the United States. One of Hare’s professors, the poet Melvin B. Tolson
Melvin B. Tolson
Melvin Beaunorus Tolson was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several long historical poems. His work was influenced by his study of the Harlem Renaissance, although he spent nearly all of...
, was mayor of the town for four terms, was named poet laureate of Liberia, and eventually his spectacular style of teaching would be portrayed in "The Great Debaters
The Great Debaters
The Great Debaters is a 2007 American biopic period drama film directed by and starring two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington and produced by Oprah Winfrey and her production company, Harpo Productions...
." Graduating from Langston with an AB in Sociology, Hare won a Danforth fellowship to continue his education and obtained an MA (1957) and PhD in Sociology (1962) from the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
. Hare received another PhD in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology
California School of Professional Psychology
The California School of Professional Psychology , was founded by the California Psychological Association in 1969. It is part of Alliant International University.The school has trained approximately half of the licensed psychologists in California...
in San Francisco, California (1975).
Black Studies
Hare wrote the “Conceptual Proposal for a Department of Black Studies" and coined the term “ethnic studies” (which was being called “minority studies”) after he was recruited to San Francisco State in February 1968 by the Black Student Union leader Jimmy Garrett and the college’s liberal president, John SummerskillJohn Summerskill
John Henry Summerskill was an educator who served as the seventh president of San Francisco State University in the 1960s. Prior to this he was Vice President for Student Affairs at Cornell University. In the 1970s he was named President of Athens College in Greece...
. Hare had just been dismissed from a six-year stint as a sociology professor at Howard University
Howard University
Howard University is a federally chartered, non-profit, private, coeducational, nonsectarian, historically black university located in Washington, D.C., United States...
, after he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, The Hilltop
The Hilltop
The Hilltop can mean:*Hilltop, Columbus, Ohio*"The Hilltop," a nickname for Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.* The Hilltop , the student newspaper of Howard University in Washington, D.C....
, in which he mocked Howard president James Nabrit’s plan (announced in the Washington Post on September 6, 1966) to make Howard “sixty per cent white by 1970.” James Nabrit
James Nabrit
James Nabrit III is an African American civil rights attorney who won several important decisions before the U.S. Supreme Court.Nabrit III was born in Texas to James Nabrit, Jr., a prominent civil rights attorney, law professor and later President of Howard University. James Nabrit III graduated...
had been one of the civil rights attorneys who successfully argued the 1954 “Brown vs. Board of Education” case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The “Black Power” cry had been issued just two month’s earlier by one of Hare’s former Howard students, Stokely Carmichael
Stokely Carmichael
Kwame Ture , also known as Stokely Carmichael, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party...
(another of Hare’s students at Howard was Claude Brown
Claude Brown
Claude Brown is the author ofManchild in the Promised Land, published to critical acclaim in 1965, which tells the story of his coming of age during the 1940s and 1950s in Harlem...
, author of Manchild in the Promised Land). Hare had taught sociology at Howard since 1961, the year before he obtained the Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
On February 22, 1967, Hare stood at press conference, with a group of students calling themselves “The Black Power Committee,” and read “The Black University Manifesto,” which Hare had written with the input of the Black Power Committee. The manifesto expressly called for “the overthrow of the Negro college with white innards and to raise in its place a black university, relevant to the black community and its needs." Hare had previously published a book called The Black Anglo Saxons and coined the phrase “The Ebony Tower” to characterize Howard University.
In the spring of 1967, he invited Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali is an American former professional boxer, philanthropist and social activist...
to speak at Howard and introduced him when the controversial heavyweight champion gave his popular “Black Is Best” speech to an impromptu crowd of 4,000 gathered at a moment’s notice outside the university’s Frederick Douglass Hall after the administration padlocked the Crampton Auditorium in the days leading up to Ali’s refusal of his military draft. Following Hare’s dismissal that June, he briefly resumed his own aborted professional boxing efforts, winning his last fight by a knockout in the first round in the Washington Coliseum on December 5, 1967.
At San Francisco State, where the Black Student Union demanded an “autonomous Department of Black Studies,” Hare was soon involved in a five-month strike for black studies led by The Black Student Union, backed by the Third World Liberation Front and the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. Black, white, and Third World students and professors participated in the strike, which also included community leaders and the Black Faculty Union, headed by Hare. The late actor, Mel Stewart
Mel Stewart
Milton "Mel" Stewart was an American character actor, television director, and musician who appeared in numerous films and television shows from the 1960s to the 1990s. He is best known for playing Henry Jefferson on the popular television series All in the Family...
was a member of the Black Faculty Unon, but Hare was the only faculty member invited to become a "quasi-member" of the Central Committee of the Black Student Union, which included a student named Danny Glover
Danny Glover
Danny Lebern Glover is an American actor, film director, and political activist. Glover is perhaps best known for his role as Detective Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film franchise.-Early life:...
, who would go on to become a successful Hollywood actor. One of the speakers almost daily at the noonday rallies of the strike was Ronald Dellums, who was later elected to the U.S. Congress and later Mayor of Oakland, California.
After one San Francisco State College president (the late John Summerskill) was fired and another (Robert Smith) resigned, Smith was replaced by the general semanticist S.I. Hayakawa (who would later become a U.S. Senator). Hayakawa used a hard-line strategy to put down the five-month strike, declaring “martial law” and arresting a crowd of five hundred and fifty-seven rallying professors and students (the overwhelming majority of them white). Weeks later, on February 28, 1969, Hayakawa dismissed Dr. Nathan Hare as chairman of the newly formed black studies department, the first in the United States,“to become effective June 1, 1969.” Hare stayed on until June at the request of the Black Student Union and remained for many more months in an unofficial capacity of “Chairman in Exile.”
Hare then teamed with Robert Chrisman and the late Allen Ross (a white printer and small businessman in Sausalito who had immigrated from Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
) to become the founding publisher of “The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research” in November 1969. The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
would soon call The Black Scholar “the most important journal devoted to black issues since ‘The Crisis
The Crisis
The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , and was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois , Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, W.S. Braithwaite, M. D. Maclean.The original title of the journal was...
.'” Ten years earlier, in 1959, Hare had briefly been a clerical assistant to the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies
Journal of Asian Studies
The Journal of Asian Studies is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Asian Studies, covering Asian studies. The journal was first established in 1941 as The Far Eastern Quarterly, obtaining its new title in September 1956...
then being edited by Andrew Hacker, a white history professor at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
, where Hare developed a dream of someday editing a “Journal of Negro Studies” ("Negro" was the word still in fashion for blacks in 1959). In 1968, during a break in a television panel including Nathan Glazer
Nathan Glazer
Nathan Glazer is an American sociologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley and for several decades at Harvard University...
, co-author of The Lonely Crowd, Glazer wrote a note to Hare on a white index card saying "Needed: a Black Scholar journal." Before starting The Black Scholar, Hare had written and published articles in magazines and periodicals that included: Ebony
Ebony (magazine)
Ebony, a monthly magazine for the African-American market, was founded by John H. Johnson and has published continuously since the autumn of 1945...
, Negro Digest, Black World, Phylon Review, Social Forces, Social Education, Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, and The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
.
After leaving The Black Scholar in 1975, in a dispute over the changing direction of the journal, and obtaining a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco, Nathan Hare began the private practice of psychotherapy, with offices in San Francisco and Oakland. He also focused on forming a movement for “A Better Black Family” (the title of a popular speaking out editorial he wrote for the February 1976 issue of Ebony magazine) shortly after completing a dissertation on “Black Male/Female Relations” at the California School of Professional Psychology.
By 1979, in collaboration with his wife (Dr. Julia Hare, author of How to Find and Keep a BMW (Black Man Working), Hare formed The Black Think Tank, which published the journal of “Black Male/Female Relationships” for several years. After the journal folded, Hare went into the full-time practice of psychology and the development of the Black Think Tank. In 1985, a small book written by him and his wife ("Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood") was disseminated by The Black Think Tank, issuing the call and becoming the catalyst for the contemporary rites of passage movement for African-American boys that emerged as the Hares lectured and spread the idea of the rites of passage for black boys throughout the United States.
Publications
In addition to dozens of articles in a number of scholarly journals and popular magazines, from The Black Scholar and EbonyEbony (magazine)
Ebony, a monthly magazine for the African-American market, was founded by John H. Johnson and has published continuously since the autumn of 1945...
to Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, Saturday Review and The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, Nathan Hare is the author of several books:
- The Black Anglo Saxons. New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965; New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1970; Chicago: Third World Press edition, Chicago, 1990)0-88378-130-1.
Books in collaboration with his wife, Julia Hare (the former radio talk show host and television guest, who also is a graduate of Langston University) have been published and widely distributed by The Black Think Tank, headquartered in San Francisco. They include:
- The Endangered Black Family, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1984, ISBN 0-9613086-0-5.
- Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood: the Passage, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1985, ISBN 0-9613086-1-3.
- Crisis in Black Sexual Politics, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1989, ISBN 0-9613086-2-1.
- Fire on Mount Zion: An Autobiography of the Tulsa Race Riot, as told by Mabel B. Little. Langston: The Melvin B. Tolson Black Heritage Center, Langston University, 1990, ISBN 0-9613086-1-4
- The Miseducation of the Black Child: The Hare Plan to Educate Every Black Man, Woman and Child, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1991, ISBN 0-9613086-4-8.
- The Black Agenda, San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 2002, ISBN 0-9613086-9-9.
While publisher of The Black Scholar from 1969–75, Nathan Hare co-edied two books with Robert Chrisman:
- Contemporary Thought, Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1973, ISBN 0-672-51821-X.
- Pan-Africanism, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, ISBN 0-672-51869-4.