Nathan Hare, a scholar and writer who helped shape Black empowerment movements in the 1960s, including a five-month strike by students and faculty at San Francisco State College that led to the creation of the nation’s first extensive Black studies program, died June 10 at a hospital in San Francisco. He was 91.
The death was announced by the Black Scholar, a journal Dr. Hare co-founded in 1969. No other details were noted.
Dr. Hare was among a wave of Black professors in the 1960s challenging higher education curriculum they saw as undervaluing the Black experience in America and giving too much weight to European traditions and perspectives.
Dr. Hare’s 1965 treatise, “Black Anglo-Saxons,” asserted that African Americans have lost their way and identity by trying to assimilate with White culture. He expanded his influence by pushing the academic and literary debates into protest action.
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His public statements grew more provocative — intentionally so, he said, to get attention — and reflected the growing power of Black nationalist ideology from activists such as Malcolm X on the wider civil rights movement. Dr. Hare proclaimed that a race war in the United States was likely and once, during a 1967 showdown while teaching sociology at Howard University, called for the historically Black institution in Washington to effectively be seized in a coup.
“People will have to take over Howard and run it themselves to a decent administration,” he told U.S. News and World Report. “The university might have to be brought to a halt, closed, wiped out, eliminated.”
Dr. Hare was locked in a feud with Howard’s president, James M. Nabrit Jr., over university plans to significantly boost enrollment by White students. Dr. Hare bitterly mocked Nabrit — who was widely admired for his legal battles against segregation — in a September 1966 letter to the editor in Howard’s student newspaper, the Hilltop.
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The tensions deepened in March 1967. Antiwar demonstrators at Howard forced the abrupt cancellation of a campus speech by Gen. Lewis Hershey, who led the Selective Service System in charge of the military draft. Dr. Hare was among five faculty members suspended for links to the protest.
In defiance, Dr. Hare arranged to bring Muhammad Ali to Howard for a Black power rally after the boxer refused to serve in Vietnam. “We have been using the wrong tactics in the past,” said Dr. Hare. “Assimilation has not worked. We’ve been signing when we should be swinging, maybe.”
That summer, Dr. Hare was dismissed by Howard. “Dehired,” Dr. Hare called it. He joined the faculty of San Francisco State (now San Francisco State University) to start the next semester in September 1967.
At the time, the college had courses in what it called “minority studies” — a term Dr. Hare rejected. He pushed San Francisco State to create a new concentration of classes exploring Black history and contemporary affairs. The administration did not agree.
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In early November 1968, Dr. Hare was at the center of a strike that gained widespread support among students and faculty, including an influential member of the English department, George Murray, who was part of the Black Panther Party. Among the strike demands was a Black Studies department and increasing Dr. Hare’s title and pay to that of a full professor.
The college’s interim president, S.I. Hayakawa, denounced the strikers. He once climbed onto a protesters’ van during the strike and ripped the wires from a loudspeaker.
He then allowed police onto the campus in a blitz-style raid in January 1969 that touched off clashes and led to more than 400 arrests, including Dr. Hare. An account by United Press International described police swinging batons and students responding with “rocks, bottles, bricks and sharpened clubs.”
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By March, a shaky truce was hammered out. Hayakawa stuck to his earlier promise to create a School of Ethnic and Black Studies led by Dr. Hare. But he also announced that Dr. Hare’s contract would not be renewed when the semester ended in June. “I have full authority to hire and fire any person,” said Hayakawa, who later served as a Republican U.S. senator from California from 1977 to 1983.
Dr. Hare turned his back on academia. In late 1969, he founded the Black Scholar with poet Robert Chrisman and activist Allan Ross. The journal quickly established itself as one of the leading Black-run outlets for essays and analysis.
In the journal’s first issue in December 1969, Dr. Hare’s “From the Publisher” column called on readers to think about their place in history.
“Frederick Douglass said a century ago that he who would be free must strike the first blow and we are just now getting around to raising our fists in a ritual of symbolism,” he wrote. “We must build a new sense of struggle, a willingness to sacrifice for our own freedom.”
Boxing dreams
Nathaniel Hare was born in Slick, Okla., on April 9, 1933. He spent a few years as a child with an aunt in Oklahoma City and then returned to Slick, where his father was a sharecropper.
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After his parents separated when he was 9, Nathan moved with his mother and siblings to San Diego. She found custodial work at a Navy base.
Nathan took an interest in boxing — expressing his delight at knocking around an older bully. The family returned to Oklahoma, where his mother purchased a farm with savings from her job. Nathan considered training to become a professional boxer, but decided to pursue sociology at Langston University, a historically Black college in Oklahoma. He worked as a janitor to pay his tuition.
After he received a bachelor’s degree in 1955, he continued sociology studies at the University of Chicago with a master’s degree in 1957 and a doctorate in 1962.
At Howard as an associate professor, he quickly became immersed in civil rights causes and the politics of Washington. Among his students were future activist Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and the writer Claude Brown.
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Dr. Hare resigned in 1975 from the Black Scholar, believing that the staff was abandoning Black nationalism in favor of “Black Marxist” political views. “I soon found my contribution sabotaged and almost liquidated,” he told the New York Times.
He opened a private practice as a psychologist and received a second doctorate from the California School of Professional Psychology in 1975. He and his wife — a former Langston student, Julia Reed, he married in 1956 — founded the Black Think Tank, which published books that included the couple’s “The Endangered Black Family” (1984), examining how slavery, racism and other factors have eroded Black communities.
Dr. Hare’s wife died in 2019. They did not have children and he had no other survivors.
During his first years at Howard, Dr. Hare had a secret. He was boxing under the name Nat Harris in attempts to keep Howard colleagues from finding out.
In one bout in 1963, two Howard faculty members were in the crowd and noticed Dr. Hare in the ring. He later received an ultimatum from the university. “Fight or teach,” he recalled being told, “you can’t do both.”
