The Black Scholar (TBS), the third-oldest journal of Black culture and political thought in the United States, was founded in 1969 near San Francisco, California, by Robert Chrisman, Nathan Hare, and Allan Ross. It is arguably the most influential journal of Black Studies and central to the very emergence of that field. After being renewed and reinvigorated in 2012, it has continued its influence. In 2017, The Princeton Review of Academic Journals ranked it the number-one journal of Black Studies in the United States. Its associated Black Scholar Press has published books since the 1970s. The journal is currently housed at Boston University's Program in African American Studies.
Production
The Black Scholar's editor-in-chief is the scholar and writer Louis Chude-Sokei, author of works including The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2005) and The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). Shannon Hanks-Mackey is the managing editor. Of all Black journals in the U.S., only the NAACP’s The Crisis (founded in 1910) and the Journal of African American History (formerly The Journal of Negro History, founded in 1916) have been publishing for a longer period of time.[1] TBS is owned by the Robert Chrisman Foundation, a Seattle, Washington-based non-profit educational organization, and is published quarterly by Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
Original editorial board
Robert Chrisman (1937–2013) and Nathan Hare (b. 1933) were active in the 1968 Black and ethnic studies battles at San Francisco State University. Hare had been hired to coordinate a Black Studies program, the first in the United States, and to write a proposal for a department of Black studies, which Black students wanted to have as a fully independent department. As a consequence of a five-month student-faculty strike, the first and the longest strike for Black studies in the US academy, Hare, who was arrested twice for activities during the strike, was fired and Chrisman was removed as a professor from tenure track. The strike experience motivated Chrisman and Hare to create a venue outside of the academy for Black knowledge production.
In November 1969, Hare (publisher), Chrisman (editor) and Allan Ross, a white Bay Area printer (as business manager) founded The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research to cover issues of social, cultural, economic and political thought. Its opening issue, "The Culture of Revolution", featured articles by Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Sékou Touré, and Stokely Carmichael, among others, with Nathan Hare writing the lead article on the First Pan African Cultural Festival Cultural Festival held in Algiers in the summer. There he obtained articles from African intellectuals such as Sékou Touré, as well as Eldridge Clever and his rival, Stokely Carmichael, both of whom had just expatriated to Africa.
Early members of the editorial and advisory board included Shirley Chisholm, Imamu Baraka, Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, Chuck Stone, Dempsey Travis, Max Roach, John Oliver Killens, Ossie Davis, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Ron Karenga, and Lerone Bennett. Robert L. Allen (b. 1942) joined the journal as associate editor in 1974, then rose to senior editor (during the shakeup surrounding Nathan Hare's departure and Robert Chrisman's move to the position of publisher, later editor and publisher), while Robert Allen remained senior editor until his retirement in 2012.
Departure of Hare and Ross
Nathan Hare left The Black Scholar in 1975 during an ideological dispute. In his open letter of resignation, Hare accused other board members of conspiring to further a Black Marxist agenda at the expense of competing ideologies. Writing of Hare's resignation, The New York Times called The Black Scholar the most important Black journal since The Crisis magazine of W. E. B. DuBois. Allan Ross had left a year or so earlier, but Hare declined his entreaties to leave with him. Robert Allen was brought in to replace Ross on the Board but in the position of associate editor, with Ross's assistant (Gloria Bevien) taking his place as business manager. Allan Ross died in 1974. Then Hare left in the spring of 1975.
The public split attracted coverage from national newspapers. The New York Times covered the story in an article titled "Ideology Dispute Shakes Black Journal", while the New York Amsterdam News headline read "Black Reds Take Over Black Scholar!"