Robert Chrisman

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.

Chrisman graduated from UC Berkeley in 1958 with a BA in English Literature and a minor in Philosophy.

In 1960 he obtained an MA in English Language Arts from San Francisco State University.

Among his instructors at SF State were Herbert Blau, Mark Linenthal and James Schevill.

His poem "Swan Lake", inspired by his then wife Gale Chrisman, received a Borestone Mountain Poetry Award and was published in its 15th annual issue, Best Poems of 1962 (1963).

He obtained a PhD in English from the University of Michigan; his dissertation was a study of the Afro-modernist poet Robert Hayden.

The launching of TBS followed in the wake of the 1968 historic strike at San Francisco State University, which involved thousands of students and faculty, including Chrisman and Hare, in a prolonged and sometimes violent struggle with the administration and the state.

The strike, one of the longest of its kind in the US, lasted for five months and grew out of frustrations of black students and instructors who wanted the university to establish an independent Black Studies department.

These demands were eventually won but Chrisman paid a high price for the victory; he and Nathan Hare were fired from their teaching positions.

Chrisman was reinstated but not in a tenure-track position.

Disappointed with the way in which black struggles were being represented by the mainstream media, Chrisman, Hare, and Ross concluded an independent journal was needed.

They determined to create an interdisciplinary journal to unite black street activists and academic intellectuals in common advocacy for the needs of the black community.

Although TBS was inspired by the Black Power and black student movements of the decade, it did not identify with a particular party.

Chrisman has said that he and Hare felt that "...blacks were a pre-party state, for the various ideologies and groups that comprised the black movement had not forged a consensus or unity."

Chrisman stated: "From the start, we believed every contributor should have her own style. We felt the black studies and new black power movement was yet to build its own language, its own terminology, its own style. So, we said, 'let a thousand flowers bloom. Let's have a lot of different styles.'"

In regards to Chrisman's impact, Robert L. Allen, the long-term Senior Editor of TBS and close friend of Chrisman, stated,

"I know of no one who has worked harder than Robert Chrisman to actualize an intellectual vision. In building TBS he demonstrated the power of the principles of self-determination and self-reliance. He built the journal not by relying on grants and funding from foundations and government agencies, but by relying on the people we serve – teachers, students, community activists, labor activists, writers and artists, librarians, academicians, and just plain working people – our subscribers. These folks have shown that they have the power to sustain an intellectual enterprise and keep it independent. Chrisman believed that by relying on community support TBS could be self determining. For over forty years Robert Chrisman's strategic vision enabled TBS to make a path where there was none before."

In addition to his writing and editing, Chrisman maintained a long career in academia.

He taught a variety of courses in literature, creative writing, cultural studies, and black studies at institutions that include the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, University of San Francisco, University of Michigan, Williams College, UC Berkeley, University of Vermont, and Wayne State University.

In November 1969, Robert Chrisman co-founded The Black Scholar (TBS) with Nathan Hare and Allan Ross, a white printer and activist.

Chrisman's MA thesis was a collection of poems that became the nucleus for his first book of poetry, Children of Empire (1981).

Chrisman edited the college literary magazine, Transfer.

In 2005 he retired as Professor and Chair of the Black Studies Department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO).

Among the initiatives he developed while at UNO was the creation of an annual Malcolm X Festival in Omaha, the city where Malcolm X was born.

Described as "a poet worthy of praise and wider recognition", Chrisman published three volumes of poetry:

His poems were published in Occident, Transfer, Contact, Plural, Galley Sail Review, Berkeley Review, Callaloo, Wasafiri, South and West, Mexico Quarterly Review, Frisco, The Black Scholar, and elsewhere.

Chrisman used poetry as one of the primary forms through which to express his vision.

As a poet Chrisman experimented with a broad range of styles and subject matter, while maintaining a modernist poetics characterized by formal rigor and lyrical density.

Chrisman often explores the human consequences of empires both ancient and modern, highlighting local and international perspectives (as in "Children of Empire", CE; "Perfectly Normal", "Goyescas", and "Joseph", MC; "The Road to Basra" and "Leviathan", TDW).

Of such poems Andrew Salkey wrote: "The statement poems are all politically engaged [and] morally committed to anti-imperialist discourse and Third World revolutionary aspirations but mindful of the demands of poetic technique and prosodic practice."