Nathan Hare

Nathan Hare (born April 9, 1933) is an American sociologist, activist, academic, and psychologist. In 1968 he was the first person hired to coordinate a black studies program at the university level in the United States, which he set up at San Francisco State University. A graduate of Langston University and the University of Chicago, he had become 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 Negro Scholar (now The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research). They worked together for several years.

After earning his second Ph.D., in clinical psychology, Hare set up a private practice in Oakland and San Francisco. Together with his wife, Dr. Julia Hare, he founded the Black Think Tank and for several years published a periodical, Black Male/Female Relationships. He and his wife have written and published several books together on black families and history.

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 to go to California and 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.

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