Robert Chrisman

Robert Chrisman died on March 10, 2013, at his home in San Francisco of complications from congestive heart failure. He was 75. He is survived by his daughter, Laura Chrisman.

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.

In 2001 Chrisman co-edited with Laurence Goldstein the anthology, Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Additionally Chrisman was a prolific essayist who covered a wide range of subject material from black incarceration and global political struggles to the literary genre of the slave narrative. His many essays include:

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

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. 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. 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.

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.

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.