Nathan Hare, a sociologist who helped lead a five-month strike by faculty and students at what is now San Francisco State University, resulting in an agreement in 1969 to create the country’s first program in Black studies, with him as its director, died at a hospital in San Francisco on June 10. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by the poet and playwright Marvin X, a close friend of Hare’s.
Dr. Nathan Hare, seen here at a talk at the University of Colorado in 1969, has died. He was a leading figure in bringing the ideas of Black power into academic circles, first at Howard University and then at San Francisco State College (now University). (Denver Post Archives)
A son of Oklahoma sharecroppers who was educated in the state’s segregated schools and later at the University of Chicago, Hare was a leading figure in bringing the ideas of Black power into academic circles, first at Howard University and then at San Francisco State College (now University), and later as a co-founder of The Black Scholar, a leading interdisciplinary journal.
He considered himself a Black nationalist, and in all three roles he clashed with both the establishment administrations and other factions on the political left, particularly Marxists.
Hare was forced out of his job at Howard in 1967 after a public fight with its president, who wanted to accept more white students. The next year, he arrived at San Francisco State, which already had courses in “minority studies,” and immediately began pushing for an interdisciplinary program dedicated to studying the Black experience.
He also bristled at the term “minority studies” and pushed back at its use by coining the term “ethnic studies.”
The administration resisted, leading to a five-month strike in 1968 and ’69 by faculty and students — who, Hare frequently pointed out, were mostly white, though their ranks also included future Black figures like the actor Danny Glover and the politician Ron Dellums.
Two presidents were forced to resign over the strife. A third, interim president, S.I. Hayakawa, cracked down on the protests by allowing police to arrest hundreds of them. But in early 1969 he and the protest leaders reached an agreement that included the creation of a Black studies program, to be led by Hare. (Hayakawa was later made permanent president and served as a U.S. senator from 1977 to 1983.)
The peace did not last long. After Hare insisted that the department was not a traditional academic unit but a revolutionary tool, Hayakawa fired him.
Hare returned to campus that fall, asserting that he was the rightful department head; he even tried to hold his own classes. But the university eventually forced him out, and he left academia for good.
“Nathan was the agent who symbolized this great battlefront with the mainstream,” Abdul Alkalimat, a professor emeritus of African American studies and library science at the University of Illinois, said by phone. “And like the Marines, you take a hit, and you create the possibility of those who come after you.”
Later in 1969, Hare joined the poet …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
