Robert Chrisman

Robert Chrisman
Born	May 28, 1937 Yuma, Arizona
Died	March 10, 2013 (aged 75) San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Occupation	Writer, poet, critic, activist, scholar, editor, professor

Robert Chrisman (May 28, 1937 – March 10, 2013) was a poet, scholar, and founding editor and publisher of The Black Scholar (TBS). Chrisman and the internationally acclaimed TBS "occupied the vanguard of the struggle for recognition of Black Studies as a serious academic endeavor."

Robert Chrisman was born on May 28, 1937, in Yuma, Arizona, and raised near Nogales, Arizona. His parents had moved to Arizona from Chicago. Chrisman's father Alfred was an auto mechanic. His mother, Thelma Allimono, was a homemaker and later in life became a teacher. She was a daughter of W.D. Allimono, the first African-American certified public accountant.

In the 1950s Chrisman's family moved to the Bay Area. He quickly became involved in the diverse San Francisco cultural scene. He studied literature in UC Berkeley's English department, under the mentorship of Josephine Miles. Independently Chrisman discovered the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Robert Hayden, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Pablo Neruda, Mao Tse-tung, and the Beat Generation writers.

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