When Hare was eleven years old, his family migrated to San Diego, California during the defense buildup related to World War II.

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.

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.

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.

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

The champion gave his popular "Black Is Best" speech to an impromptu crowd of 4,000 gathered at a moment's notice outside the university's Frederick Douglass Hall.

Hare was recruited to San Francisco State in February 1968 by John Summerskill, the college's liberal president, and the Black Student Union leader Jimmy Garrett.

The strike was led by the Black Student Union and backed by the Third World Liberation Front and the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

A broad range of students and professors participated in the strike, which also included community leaders and the Black Faculty Union headed by Hare.

Student Ronald Dellums spoke almost daily at the noonday strike rallies; he later became a politician, serving in Congress and as Mayor of Oakland, California.

The student-faculty strike disrupted university operations, and contributed to the firing of President Summerskill and resignation of his successor, Robert Smith.

Hayakawa used a hard-line strategy to put down the five-month strike, declaring "martial law" and arresting a crowd of 557 rallying professors and students (the overwhelming majority of whom were white).

Weeks later, on February 28, 1969, Hayakawa dismissed Hare as chairman of the newly formed black studies department, the first in the United States, effective June 1 of that year.

Months after being fired from San Francisco State, Hare teamed with Robert Chrisman, a black faculty member of the college's English Department, and Allan Ross (an independent white intellectual who owned the Graphic Arts of Marin printing company near Sausalito).

Hare and Chrisman chipped in $300 each to launch the journal, working from a room that Ross made available to them rent-free in the Graphic Arts building.

Other early members of the editorial board included Shirley Chisholm, later elected to the US Congress; Imamu Baraka, a noted playwright; Angela Davis, scholar and activist; Dempsey Travis, Max Roach, John Oliver Killens, Ossie Davis, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Ron Karenga, and Lerone Bennett.

He published articles from leading African intellectuals as well as the American activist Stokely Carmichael and recently exiled Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver.

Its title was featured on a cover that included pieces by Eldridge Cleaver, John Oliver Killens, Ernest J. Gaines, Robert Hayden, Malcolm X, Chester Himes, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Margaret Walker, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed.

Through friends and contacts of Hare's wife Julia, who was then Public Information Director of the Western Regional office of the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing, The Black Scholar was featured in Newsweek under an article entitled, "From the Ebony Tower."