Nathan Hare, 91, Forceful Founder of First Black Studies Program, Dies

Nathan Hare, a sociologist who helped lead a five-month strike by faculty members 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 Dr. Hare’s.

A son of Oklahoma sharecroppers who was educated in the state’s segregated schools and later at the University of Chicago, Dr. 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.

Dr. 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 members and students — who, Dr. 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.