Nathan Hare

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.

Nathan Hare (born April 9, 1933) is an American sociologist, activist, academic, and psychologist.

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.

Nabrit had been part of the NAACP legal team to successfully argue the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

His spectacular style of teaching would be portrayed in The Great Debaters. Graduating from Langston with his BA in Sociology, Hare won a Danforth Fellowship to continue his education; he obtained an MA (1957) and PhD in Sociology (1962) from the University of Chicago.

Hare married fellow Langston University student Julia Ann Reed.

She worked in communications and public relations, and later collaborated with him on several books and as cofounder of The Black Think Tank.

Hare started his academic career in 1961 as an assistant sociology professor at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, DC.

In 1966 he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, The Hilltop, mocking Howard president James Nabrit's statement to The Washington Post on September 3, 1966, that he hoped to increase white enrollment at Howard to as much as 60%.

By 1966, the civil rights movement had achieved passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

After that, some activists were seeking "Black Power," as declared Stokely Carmichael in Montgomery, Alabama, who was a former student of Hare.

(Hare had also taught Claude Brown, future author of Manchild in the Promised Land).

He was dismissed in June 1967 after becoming increasingly involved with the Black Power movement on campus and leading student-faculty protests.

On February 22, 1967, Hare held a press conference, with students identified as "The Black Power Committee," and read "The Black University Manifesto."

It called for "the overthrow of the Negro college with white innards and to raise in its place a black university, relevant to the black community and its needs."

Hare had previously published a book called The Black Anglo Saxons; he coined the phrase, "The Ebony Tower," to characterize Howard University.

In the spring of 1967, Hare invited the champion fighter Muhammad Ali to speak at Howard.

He was controversial for statements about black power and as one of numerous opponents to the Vietnam War.

In 1968 he was the first person hired to coordinate a Black studies program in the United States.

He established the program at San Francisco State.

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 Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research), of which Nathan Hare was founding publisher from 1969 to 1975.

After earning his Ph.D., in clinical psychology, Hare set up a private practice in Oakland and San Francisco.

Together with his wife, 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.

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.

Hare's life changed in high school after he was selected in ninth grade to represent the class at the annual statewide "Interscholastic Meet" of the black students held at Oklahoma's Langston University.

(His English teacher had administered standardized tests in English Composition, and selected him for his score on the test.) Hare won first prize at the meet, with more prizes to come in ensuing years.

The L'Ouverture principal encouraged him to go to college and arranged for him to start at Langston with a full-time job working in the University Dining Hall to pay his way.

By his junior year, Hare was working as a Dormitory Proctor of the University Men, and as a Freshman Tutor in his senior year.

When Hare enrolled at Langston University, it was the only college to admit Black students in the state of Oklahoma.

The town of Langston and the college were named for John Mercer Langston, one of five African Americans elected to Congress from the South in the late 19th century, before the former Confederate states passed constitutions that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and ended their participation in politics for decades.

The town was founded by black nationalists hoping to make the Oklahoma Territory an all-Black state.

Langston, Oklahoma claimed to being the first all-black town established in the United States.

One of Hare's professors was the poet Melvin B. Tolson.

He was also elected mayor of the town for four terms, and was named poet laureate of Liberia.