The Black Scholar

The Black Scholar (TBS), the third-oldest journal of black culture and political thought in the United States, was founded in 1969 near San Francisco, California, by Robert Chrisman, Nathan Hare and Allan Ross. It is arguably the most influential journal of Black Studies and central to the very emergence of that field. Its associated Black Scholar Press has published books since the 1970s.

The Black Scholar's Editor-in-Chief is the writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei; its Senior Editor is Shireen K. Lewis (scholar and founder/director of SisterMentors, a notable non-profit in Washington DC). Additionally, historian Jonathan Fenderson and Safiya Umoja Noble, scholar of technology and critical media studies, serve as Associate Editors, and Shannon Hanks-Mackey is Managing Editor. It is the third-oldest journal in print. The NAACP’s Crisis and the Journal of African American History (formerly The Journal of Negro History) have been publishing for a longer period of time.TBS is owned by the Black World Foundation, an Oakland, California, non-profit educational organization, and published quarterly by Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

Robert Chrisman (1937–2013), Nathan Hare (b. 1933) were active in the 1968 black and ethnic studies battles at San Francisco State University. Hare, among others, had been hired to set up a Black Studies program, which black students wanted to have as a fully independent department. As a consequence of a five-month student-faculty strike, the first and the longest strike for black studies in the US academy, Hare was fired and Chrisman was removed as a professor from tenure track. The strike experience motivated Chrisman and Hare to create a venue outside of the academy for black knowledge production.