Nathan Hare

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Nathan Hare (April 9, 1933) was the first person hired to coordinate a black studies program in the United States, at San Francisco State in 1968.

[edit] Early Life and Education

Nathan Hare was born on a sharecropper’s farm near the ghost town of Slick, Oklahoma on April 9, 1933. He attended L’Ouvrture Elementary School, one of the “Slick Separate Schools.” His family migrated to San Diego in 1945 when his single mother took a civilian janitorial job with the Navy air station. As [World War II] ended and his mother was laid off, the family returned to Oklahoma. This put his ambition to become a professional boxer on hold, something he had picked up after adult neighbors in San Diego assured him that writers—which he initially wanted to be—all starve to death. The direction of his life would change when his [L’Ouverture High School] English teacher gave three standardized tests to see who would represent the class at the statewide competition for Black students held each year at Oklahoma’s Langston University. Hare represented the school and won first prize with more prizes to come in succeeding years. The L’Ouverture principal persuaded Hare to attend college with his son and also obtained him a fulltime job working in the dining hall.

When Hare enrolled at [Langston University] (now a historial Black university) it was the only college Black students could attend in the state of Oklahoma. Named for [John Mercer Langston], the first Black 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 Oklahoma 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 Tolson], was the town's mayor for four terms and Liberia named Tolson their poet laureate. Graduating with an AB in Sociology, Hare continued his education and obtained a MA and PhD in Sociology from the [University of Chicago]. He also received another PhD in Clinical Psychology from [California School of Professional Psychology] in Berkeley, California.

[edit] Black Studies

He wrote the “Conceptual Proposal for a Department of Black Studies” – coined the term “ethnic studies” (which was being called “minority studies”) after he was recruited to San Francisco State by Black Student Union leader Jimmy Garrett ad the college’s liberal president, John Summerskill. 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, criticizing Howard president James Nabrit’s plan (announced in the Washington Post on September 6, 1966) to make Howard “site by 1970.” 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 Chciago.

In a matter of months, Hare stood at a February 1967 press conference with a group of students calling itself “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.”

In the spring of 1967, Nathan Hare 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.

Lured to San Francisco State on February 1, 1968 to become coordinator of the first “Black Studies” program, Hare wrote the “Conceptual Proposal for a Department of Black Studies” which was widely distributed throughout the United States and would soon become a model for emerging black studies program in colleges across the nation.

At San Francisco State, where the Black Student Union then 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 (but including black and white students and professors as well as local community leaders). The actor Danny Glover was a member of the Black Student Union’s Central Committee. One of the speakers almost daily at the noonday rallies of the strike was Ronald Dellums, now the new mayor of Oakland, California and formerly a U.S. congressman.

After the college’s president resigned, he was replaced by a bestselling general semanticist S.I. Hayakawa (who would later become a U.S. Senator). Hayakawa quickly took the helm of the college and a hard-line strategy to put down the five-month strike after declaring “martial law” and arresting as many as five hundred and fifty-seven rallying professors and students (the overwhelming majority of them white). A few 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. Later he remained for a many months in an unofficial capacity of “Chairman in Exile.”

Hare then teamed with Robert Chrisman and Allen Ross and became the founding publisher of “The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research” in November of 1969. The New York Times would later call The Black Scholar “the most important journal devoted to black issues since ‘The Crisis.” Hare had briefly been a clerical assistant to the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies then being edited by a white history professor at Northwestern University and got the dream of someday editing a “Journal of Negro Studies” (Negro was the word for blacks that was still in fashion in 1959). 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 of London.

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. Hare then began the private practice of psychotherapy, with offices in San Francisco and Oakland. He also focused immediately on forming a movement for “A Better Black Family” (the title of a popular speaking out editorial he wrote in the February, 1976 issue of Ebony magazine. Hare had just completed a dissertation on “Black Male/Female Relations.”

By 1979, in collaboration with his wife, Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Nathan Hare had formed The Black Think Tank, which published the journal of “Black Male/Female Relationships” for several years before Hare expanded his part-time practice of psychology to his fulltime occupation. In 1985, a small book written by the Hares and disseminated by The Black Think Tank issued the call and became the catalyst for the contemporary rites of passage movement for African-American boys that quickly emerged as they lectured throughout the United States.

[edit] Publications

In addition to dozens of articles in a number of nationally articles in both popular and scholarly magazines, from The Black Scholar and Ebony to Newsweek, Saturday Review and The Times of London, Nathan Hare is the author of several books: The Black Anglo Saxons. New York: Marzani and Munsell, (1965); Third World Press edition (Chicago, 1990).

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 (1984)
• Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood; the Passage (1985)
• Crisis in Black Sexual Politics (1989)
• The Miseducation of the Black Child: The Hare Plan to Educate Every Black Man, Woman and Child (1991)

While publisher of The Black Scholar, Hare also co edited two books with Robert Chrisman:

• Contemporary Thought, Bobs-Merrill, 1973
• Pan-Africanism, Bobbs-Merrill, 1974