By Erica Johnson

Sociologist Nathaniel (Nathan) Hare earned two graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and assumed assistant professorships at Virginia State College and Howard University (where he taught Stokely Carmichael). After publicly disagreeing with Howard’s President James Nabrit over the administrator’s desire to increase white enrollment at the historically Black college, the administration fired him. From there, he helped establish and chaired the first Black Studies program in the United States in 1968 at San Francisco State College. This was something truly revolutionary as SFSC was a predominantly white school, “where Black students barely existed, and Black faculty and Black curriculum were non-existent.”[1] He also established The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research, cofounded the Black Think Tank with his wife, authored several books, and earned numerous awards.[2] Considered the “Father of Black Studies,” most scholars and journalists outside the state gloss over his Oklahoma upbringing and education in his biographical sketches and obituaries.[3] However, Oklahoma has a rich Black history situated within the larger Black Atlantic context that no doubt shaped his perspectives and professional life.

Born near Slick, Oklahoma in 1933, his parents were Seddie H. Hare and Tishia Lee Farmer.[4]  Born in Arkansas and Texas respectively, his parents’ families relocated to Oklahoma near its statehood in 1907. Their migrations correlated with that of other Southern African Americans, known as “Exodusters,” who moved to the Great Plains in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to flee the violence of the Jim Crow South. Black Southerners migrated to Oklahoma particularly because of the land runs of the 1880s and 1890s. Lands to homestead and potential freedom from white people in Oklahoma offered a potential alternative to other Black colonization efforts within the Atlantic World, such as those in Liberia, Canada, and even Haiti.[5] Southern Black newcomers joined Black peoples formerly enslaved by Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole, removed to the area in the 1830s. As the Black population increased, Black leaders, like E. P. McCabe, H. W. Rolfe, and W. L. Eagleson called for an all-Black state.[6] Overall, African Americans established at least fifty all-Black towns between 1865 and 1920 in what became the state of Oklahoma.[7] Seddie and Tishia did not settle in an all-Black town, but they would have known about them and their significance. The Hares first appeared in the 1920 census in Wewoka, Oklahoma but relocated to Euchee Township, between Bristow and Slick, by 1930.[8] Seddie was a sharecropper.[9] Seddie and Tishia separated when Nathan was young.[10] Seddie moved to Arizona, and Tishia briefly took the children to California during World War II before returning to Oklahoma.

The Hare children attended Separate School District No. 75 in Slick (before and after living in California). The community commonly called this all-Black school the L’Ouverture School, after Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture.[11] At the time, there were three other schools named for Louverture in the state; they were in Guthrie, McAlester, and Meridian. These four schools demonstrate that Black Oklahomans knew about the Haitian Revolution, and they chose to name their all-Black schools after its leader because he was a powerful symbol. In studying schools named after Martin Luther King, Jr., Derek H. Alderman explains how “the naming of schools after historical figures is a subtle yet powerful way of communicating ‘the accomplishments of previous generations’ and defining a set of folk heroes,” not just for students but for the community.[12] By naming these schools after Louverture, Black Oklahomans established a connection with a broader Black Atlantic through “a common historical frame of reference as well as a geographic one.”[13] While other Oklahoma towns named their all-Black schools for Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, Black Oklahomans in Guthrie, McAlester, Meridian, and Slick chose the name of a revolutionary leader in one of the most important events in global Black history.[14] Despite deep-seated racism and segregation in the rural Oklahoma town, the Hare children grew up and received their education within an African American community rooted in a broader Black consciousness and Black revolutionary tradition.

In a 2004 interview, Nathan recounted his educational experiences in Slick. He said that he began school at age four, a year early so that they could have enough students to keep the school open.[15] He remembered reading and learning about Nat Turner and Booker T. Washington in the first grade, the first time “he became aware of the race problem.”[16] He also recalled that they also sang “John Brown’s Body,” commemorating the militant white abolitionist leader. While attending Slick’s L’Ouverture High School, he said that his English teacher had the most influence on him, so much so that he first majored in English when he went to college.[17] Nathan’s successes in competing at the annual state interscholastic meet at the all-Black Langston University in 1949 and 1950 reflected her influence. He placed second in American Literature and typing as well as third place in American Democracy in 1949.[18] The next year, he won first place in American Literature and typing and second place in American Democracy.[19] Beyond the classroom, he also noted how important his principal was in being a “role maker” instead of just a role model, as he encouraged him to go to college.[20] Having received his formative education at a school named from a Haitian Revolutionary leader, he went to a college also linked to Haiti and a Black leader.

He attended Langston College located in Langston, Oklahoma. E. P. McCabe founded and named the town for John Mercer Langston in 1890 as well as the Langston City Herald “to promote African American migration” to the state.[21] Langston was an educator, attorney, Virginia Congressman, and United States Minister to Haiti from 1877 to 1885. Founded in 1897 as Colored Agricultural and Normal University, the administration renamed the school in honor of Langston in 1922. Despite the great accomplishments of the school’s namesake, Nathan was not particularly impressed with some of his education there. He claimed that his math and English teachers in high school were better than those at the college were.[22] Yet, he studied under Melvin Tolson, celebrated American poet who complicated “the views of segregated America towards the Black man” while also challenging “the Black man’s version of himself.”[23] Nathan served as junior class vice-president and was a delegate to the Oklahoma Intercollegiate Student Senate.[24] He was also Councilman-at-Large for the Langston Student Government his senior year.[25] His other extracurricular included boxing and membership in the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. Upon his graduation with a sociology degree in 1954, he left for the University of Chicago with a Danforth Graduate Fellowship, awarded to individuals “preparing themselves for college teaching careers.”[26] He also took his experiences inside and outside the classroom at an Oklahoman historically Black college named in honor of a Black American leader and diplomat to Haiti.

No one can or should discount the impact of his years at the University of Chicago and his first teaching appointments, but we must consider them along with his unique background as a Black Oklahoman. He spent most of his first twenty-one years immersed in a Black revolutionary tradition, from learning about Nat Turner in a kindergarten named for Toussaint Louverture to graduating from a Black college in a town founded by Black leaders who sought a separate all-Black state. In 1967, Hare “emerged as a spokesman for a black power movement at Howard University,” and at that time, he expressed that he had “been a militant almost ever since he can remember.”[27] His upbringing helped to fuel his advocacy of the Black Power movement. Nathan’s early experiences and his education within strong Black Oklahoma communities shaped his later academic and professional achievements, an unexpected origin for the development of Black Studies in the United States.

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Erica Johnson specializes in Caribbean and Latin American history, and her teaching fields include slavery and slave revolution, as well as Atlantic world, Native American, early modern/modern French history, and world history. She is an Associate Professor of History at Francis Marion University where she also serves as Co-Director of Africa and African-American Studies.

Title Image: Map of L’Ouverture Schools. Courtesy of the Author.

Endnotes:

[1] Oba T’Shaka, “The Passing of a ‘Great One,’” San Francisco State University Africana Studies, 1 July 2024, https://africana.sfsu.edu/news/passing-dr-nathan-hare-great-one.

[2] Eric R. Jackson, An Introduction to Black Studies (University of Kentucky Press, 2023), 11-12.

[3] For example, The New York Times only wrote “a son of Oklahoma sharecroppers educated in the state’s segregated schools.” See Clay Risen, “Nathan Hare, 91, Forceful Founder of First Black Studies Program, Dies, New York Times, 21 June 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/obituaries/nathan-hare-dead.html. See also J. L. Jeffries, “A Tribute to Dr. Nathan Fare,” Journal of African American Studies 28 (2024): 464-465 and “Dr. Nathan Hare, The Father of Black Studies,” National Council for Black Studies, https://ncbsonline.org/in-memoriam/dr-nathan-hare-the-father-of-black-studies/.

[4] His father moved to Arizona and became a Reverend. His mother moved to Kansas in the 1970s. Risen, “Nathan Hare,” New York Times, 21 June 2024; “Rev. Seddie H. Hare,” Arizona Sun, 29 November 1956, 4; and “Tishia L. Farmer,” The Kansas City Times, 14 September 1987, 16.

[5] See for example Correspondence Relative to the Emigration to Hayti, of the Free People of Colour in the United States, together with the Instructions to the Agent Sent out by President Boyer (New York:  Mahlon Day, 1824); Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity:  Memory and History in Free Antebellum Communities (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 145-166.

[6] Daniel Littlefield and Lonnie E. Underhill, “Black Dreams and ‘Free’ Homes:  The Oklahoma Territory, 1891-1894,” Phylon, vol. 34, no. 4 (1973):  342-357;Martin Dann, “From Sodom to the Promised Land:  E. P. McCabe and the Movement for Oklahoma Colonization,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, vol. XL, no. 3 (1974), 370-378.

[7] See Larry O’Dell, “All-Black Towns,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.

[8] U. S. Census Bureau, 1920 Federal Census, Lincoln, Seminole, Oklahoma and U. S. Census Bureau, 1930 Federal Census, Euchee, Creek, Oklahoma.

[9] Risen, “Nathan Hare,” New York Times, 21 June 2024 and Linda D. Wilson, “Bristow,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.

[10] They divorced in 1951. “Divorce Granted,” The Bristow News, 31 May 1951, 10.

[11] “Notice of Completion of Annex of Separate School District No. 75, Commonly Known as L’Ouverture,” The Record-Citizen (Bristow, Oklahoma), 27 October 1949, 13. The mention of Separate School District No. 75 in the local newspaper was in reference to funding for the separate schools in the county, and it indicated that Separate School District No. 75 had one teacher, W. A. Randall. See “Separate School Fund,” Bristow Enterprise, 29 June 1916, 8. Two years later, the school had a budget for multiple teachers. See “Separate School District No. 75,” Bristow Record and the Bristow Enterprise, 18 July 1918, 5.

[12] Derek H. Alderman, “School Names as Cultural Arenas:  The Naming of U.S. Public Schools after Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Urban Geography vol. 23, no. 7 (2002), 603, 605, 606.

[13] Alderman, “School Names as Cultural Arenas,” 603, 605.

[14] For example, Stillwater and Tulsa had schools named for Booker T. Washington, and Oklahoma City had Douglass High School. For more on Douglass High School, see https://www.metrolibrary.org/archives/essay/2019/07/douglass-high-school-leading-educational-institution.

[15] Nathan Hare interviewed by Loretta Henry, 5 April 2004, The History Makers, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/nathan-hare-38.

[16] “Dr. hare Boxed His Way into the Ring,” The Washington Daily News, 24 March 1967, 9.

[17] Hare interviewed by Henry, 5 April 2004, The History Makers, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/nathan-hare-38.

[18] “L’Ouveture High School Students Win State Trophy,” The Record-Citizen, 5 May 1949, 4.

[19] “Slick Students Win at Langston,” The Bristow News, 4 May 1950, 5.

[20] Hare interviewed by Henry, 5 April 2004, The History Makers, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/nathan-hare-38.

[21] Lary O’Dell, “Langston,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=LA020.

[22] Hare interviewed by Henry, 5 April 2004, The History Makers, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/nathan-hare-38.

[23] G. Matthew Jenkins, “Tolson, Melvin Beanorus,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TO002.

[24] “Langston Class Elections Held,” The Daily Oklahoman, 12 October 1952, 10 and “Langston Junior is Named Vice President of OICSS,” The Black Dispatch, 17 January 1953, 1.

[25] “Senior Class News,” Langston University Gazette, 1 November 1953, 4.

[26] “Foundation Award to Bristow Man,” The Bristow News, 13 May 1954, 4.

[27]  “Dr. hare Boxed His Way into the Ring,” The Washington Daily News, 24 March 1967, 9.