Stanford University, first to consider the Hare Papers

Dr. Hare on the Black Scholar Marvin, One other thing, on the issue of whether the journal was black if all of its support or money wasn’t -- and I said that would be determined by its content (by which I was including its ideology) – I should exlain that it is true that Bob was black (or half-black, in that his father was white – doesn’t matter that both of his wives were white, as Julia complained to the New York Times, to Charlayne Hunter, whose husband, unknown to Julia, was also white!—so he was half black but he was not black black. Indeed, the white guy, Allen Ross, and I got along well and even saw eye to eye on most things. It was Bob Chrisman that both of us had problems with, indeed as I said this morning, Al quit before I did and frequently asked me to work with him with The Black Scholar Book Club, before the died. It was Julia’s idea to call Al’s widow, who came to our apartment with her and Al’s daughter and the three of them urged me to leave The Black Scholar, over my protests that I didn’t have time, that I had to finish  my dissertation for the psychology Ph.D. in order to graduate in August. They said if I got out now that would give me more time in time to finish my thesis . That wasn’t true, but I didn’t finish it on time. I’d already planned to leave The Black Scholar once I’d graduated, before Allen Ross left. But by the time I left, the three persons on the board were Marxists and we’d argue over whether some articles should be in the journal. That included black nationalist like Haki Madhubuti, though his article was published. And after I left there was even a forum to rebut it, but perhaps causing the uninitiated to think blackness was being highlighted if anything, and giving Haki some props to boot -- so it’s easy to be misled. Bob even balked at publishing maverick Marxists like Eldridge Cleaver when he was in Algiers and out of sorts with the Panthers and the movement and a black professor in Canada, who had a divergent view – momentarily forget his name, he wasn’t famous or anything, and we did publish him, but increasingly I was losing out, once Gloria started siding with the other two, I guess partly because I had pulled away to a considerable degree in the course of the psychology degree. So the Marxist thing was just one of the reasons I left. Plus they were Marxists but acting independent of other Marxists, so far as I know, with the other two basically conceding to Bob and his caucusing with them. So actually Bob took it over. He chose Robert Allen, with my consent, as I wasn’t expecting or even cut out for no screed. Neither Al nor I wanted to hurt The Black Scholar. It was suggested to me that I sue. I could have sued but with the shaky finances of the journal it could have crumbled. What I would have done if I’m doing it now was go with Al Ross with the Black Scholar Book Club as he had left with and implored me continuously to join him, and I also could have taken the lecture bureau, which was Bob idea trying to get part of my plenteous lecture fees at the time, but I was the one who knew how it worked and set it up. Indeed one thing I came up with, Classified Ads, Bob at first opposed. I told you how we turned the corner by refusing Signet’s first printing of 105,000 copies of “The Best of the Black Scholar” over the size of the author’s cut per book, and wound up getting a bigger cut per book on two books, with 4,000 and 3,000 copies printed of each before they went out of print. There we turned the corner at the door of the big-time into the upper echelons of mediocrity. People who would build a dune in the sand disdain skylifts. Come to think of it I don’t know that Bob ever built anything else. If you don’t count the poem or two after he was at The Black Scholar and once took a leave of a month or so to work on some writing. He wasn’t missed but came back without the writing done, whatever it was. I mean the brother wrote an article in Scanlon’s, one of the few ever published anywhere, including in The Black Scholar, I remember one in the shortlved Scanlon’s called “Ecology is a Racist Shuck.” You don’t say. I almost simultaneously did an article for The Black Scholar called “Black Ecology,” which was translated into several languages around the world. Did he build that article. Indeed, I used to write little publisher’s statements and initial them. One day Al  told me Bob opposed me doing them, so I  stopped doing them, as I had other things to do. If you look at them you may see they set the tone. I interviewed people like Muhammad Ali (stayed a weekend in his home and did roadwork with him one morning when he was living outside Philadelphia to do the interview., and because I didn’t sign them when Robert Hauser wrote the biography of Ali he attributed it to  The Black Scholar and didn’t mention me. Queen Mother Moore was interviewed in my apartment (Bob didn’t know her) and I also paid my way to Detroit while I was on a speaking engagement somewhere and interviewed  Robert Williams shortly after he got back from China. Nathan Marvin, P.S. The three of us agreed to chip in $300 apiece and start The Black Scholar, but Bob could only come up with $150. Nathan From: Nathan Hare [mailto:nhare@pacbell.net]  Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 10:48 PM To: 'Marvin X Jackmon' Subject: RE: Hare papers Marvin, I still forgot to give you your glasses, I was trying to explain so much as usual, as I find it’s easy for people to be misguided for lack of facts they don’t have. E.g. Brother Editor didn’t come to The Black Scholar as a poet; I don’t think he’d ever published a poem so much as in a student newspaper at that point. But even if he had been Baraka,  he didn’t use poetry to build The Black Scholar. He might have helped to build a poet or two in time, through The Black Scholar, but their poetry did not build The Black Scholar. The Black Scholar hit the ground running with the first issue, with essentially all of the articles obtained by me. They didn’t  know him and there was not yet The Black Scholar to know. As I said this morning, Julia got it in Newsweek through friends she had met in her job as Director of Education for the soon-to-be-opened Oakland Museum.  He didn’t build The Black Scholar, The Black Scholar made him, if we can say he ever was fully made, i.e., a made man, he is certainly not a self-made man, but a man who came to The Black Scholar on the make, with nothing beyond  the tools of an unknown English teacher. I’ll hang on to the glasses. By the way, I didn’t mean for you guys to gut my brown supply chest next to the white file cabinet. I guess its contents were so scarce and rumpled you thought it was something rare. Nathan