Nathaniel Hare (April 9, 1933 – June 10, 2024) was an American sociologist, activist, academic, and psychologist. In 1968 he was the first person hired to coordinate a Black studies program in the United States. He established the program at San Francisco State University. A graduate of Langston University and the University of Chicago, he became involved in the Black Power movement while teaching at Howard University. After being fired as chair of the Black Studies program at San Francisco State, in November 1969 Hare and Robert Chrisman co-founded the journal, The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research. Nathan Hare was founding publisher of the journal from 1969 to 1975. After earning a PhD in clinical psychology, Hare set up a private practice in Oakland and San Francisco. He founded the Black Think Tank with his wife, Julia Hare, and published a periodical called Black Male/Female Relationships for several years. He and Julia Hare have written and published several books together on Black families and Black history.
Early life and education Hare was born on his parents' sharecropper farm near the Creek County town of Slick, Oklahoma, on April 9, 1933. He attended segregated public schools, L'Ouverture (variously spelled "Louverture") Elementary School and L'Ouverture High School. The two schools were named after the Haitian revolutionary and general Toussaint Louverture; they were part of the so-called "Slick Separate Schools" in the late 1930s and 1940s. When Hare was eleven years old, his family migrated to San Diego, California during the defense buildup related to World War II. His single mother took a civilian janitorial job with the Navy air station. Hundreds of thousands of blacks left the South and migrated to California and other places on the West Coast, in the Great Migration through 1970, totaling 5 million in all. As World War II ended and his mother was laid off, she brought her family back to Oklahoma. This put on hold Hare's ambition to become a professional boxer, an idea he had picked up after adult neighbors in San Diego assured him that writers all starve to death. Hare's life changed in high school after he was selected in ninth grade to represent the class at the annual statewide "Interscholastic Meet" of the black students held at Oklahoma's Langston University. (His English teacher had administered standardized tests in English Composition, and selected him for his score on the test.) Hare won first prize at the meet, with more prizes to come in ensuing years. The L'Ouverture principal encouraged him to go to college and arranged for him to start at Langston with a full-time job working in the University Dining Hall to pay his way. By his junior year, Hare was working as a Dormitory Proctor of the University Men, and as a Freshman Tutor in his senior year. When Hare enrolled at Langston University, it was the only college to admit Black students in the state of Oklahoma. The town of Langston and the college were named for John Mercer Langston, one of five African Americans elected to Congress from the South in the late 19th century, before the former Confederate states passed constitutions that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and ended their participation in politics for decades. The town was founded by black nationalists hoping to make the Oklahoma Territory an all-Black state. Langston, Oklahoma claimed to be the first all-black town established in the United States. One of Hare's professors was the poet Melvin B. Tolson, whose teaching style would be portrayed in The Great Debaters. Graduating from Langston with his BA in sociology, Hare won a Danforth Fellowship to continue his education; he obtained an MA (1957) and PhD in sociology (1962) from the University of Chicago.
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