Dr. Nathan Hare, the founder of “Father of Black Studies,” died Monday, June 10. He was 91.

Dr. Hare was hired by San Francisco State College, now San Francisco State University, as the first program coordinator for the institution’s Black Studies program in 1968. 

The program was the first of its kind in the United States.

“We are trying to start a Black studies program at state college, and I think it has the greatest and last hope to solve educational problems of the Black race in this country,” said Dr. Hare in a video in San Francisco State’s archives.

The program is still in place and is now called Africana Studies. 

Professor Sharon Jones recalls being a student during the protests held on the campus, which were led by Dr. Hare alongside the Black Panthers and the Black Student Union. 

Jones said these protests ultimately paved the way for the Black Studies program, which is now recognized and replicated at schools nationwide.

1957, Dr. Hare earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago. He married Julia Hare, a noted psychologist and sociologist. She died on February 15, 2019.

Five years later, in 1962, he earned his first two Ph.D. degrees. 

The first Ph.D. degree in sociology was from the University of Chicago, and the second, awarded from the California School of Professional Psychology in 1975, was in clinical psychology.

In 1961, he became an instructor and assistant professor in sociology at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Some of his students included Stokely Carmichael, who coined the phrase “Black Power,” and Claude Brown, author of the critically acclaimed “Manchild in the Promised Land.” 

Later, in September 1966, he wrote a letter to the editor of The Hilltop, Howard University’s student newspaper, speaking out against then-President James Nabrit’s plan to turn the university’s student body sixty percent white by 1970. 

As a result, Hare was fired in 1967. 1968, Hare joined the San Francisco State College faculty and became the school’s Black Studies program coordinator.

This has earned him the title “father of Black Studies” by scholars. As the program coordinator, Hare created the term “ethnic studies” to replace the more pejorative “minority studies.” 

Hare battled with the college administration and left the college just a year later, in 1969. Needing a way to express his thoughts and the ideas of others, he founded the scholarly periodical “The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research” in 1969. 

He left the journal in 1975 to work as a clinical psychologist in community health programs, hospitals, and private practice. In 1979, he co-founded the Black Think Tank with his wife, Julia. The Black Think Tank addresses the problems and concerns that plague the African American community.