Milton Hare and PUC, 1964–2008: the quiet transfer, the desegregation fight, and the honorary doctorate
The institution that quietly pushed out a pregnant eighteen-year-old and her seventeen-year-old husband to protect its reputation, and that opposed his fight to desegregate its own churches, gave that same man an honorary doctorate forty-four years later — and when it formally apologized to Martin Luther King Jr, it was Milton Hare, as graduation speaker, who accepted the apology on King's behalf.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Jonathan's mother was eighteen, his father seventeen, both of them Adventist missionary royalty, when a canoe ride on his grandfather's private lake produced a pregnancy her mother recognized from the morning sickness. A beautiful, hasty wedding was arranged at the grandparents' estate, the reason kept from the guests. Pacific Union College found out anyway. There was no expulsion; there was strong encouragement to transfer — a quiet institutional shuffle that placed reputation above the forgiveness the institution preached. The family's scientific pedigree — a grandfather from the Manhattan Project era of the Rad Lab world, a grandmother with a Berkeley MFA — made the landing easy: UC Berkeley, where the family's whole intellectual trajectory bent.
In the 1960s Milton fought to desegregate Adventist churches, and the college opposed him. He marched at Selma in March 1965 — his wife pregnant with Jonathan — beside Paul Cobb, the Oakland civil-rights organizer for whom Jonathan carries the middle name Paul. The church of absolute commandments had found a commandment it preferred not to apply, and Milton, characteristically, refused the accommodation. It is the same shape as his refusal of the medic compromise: he would not accept an institution enforcing its principles selectively.
Milton's revolutionary arc ran through everything — the communes, the purity wars, decades of restless evangelism for socialism, free living and absolute pacifism — and in his final decades it came full circle. Concluding that his goals of peace and equality might only be fulfilled in the afterlife, he returned to the Adventist faith of his youth, became a highly active member of the Oakland Seventh-day Adventist Church, and served beside his old friend Paul Cobb. In that church, at sixty-five, he met his last wife; their four children are the final batch of his nine.
In 2008 Pacific Union College awarded Milton an honorary doctorate and issued a formal apology to Martin Luther King Jr for having opposed the civil-rights crusade. Milton accepted the apology on King's behalf as the graduation speaker. His speech ran well over the allotted time, as his speeches did, and was exceptionally well received. The teenager quietly shuffled out in 1964 walked back in as the man the institution needed to say sorry through — which is either irony or justice, and the record is content to let the reader decide.
An institution drifted from its principles twice — once for reputation, once for segregation — and the same man stood at both drift points. The apology took forty-four years, and when it came, it came through him. Corrections published, never applied silently: it turns out that is also how institutions repent.
Episodes are building blocks. The same material appears in more than one where it belongs in more than one, and every claim traces back to a primary source.
Selma, 1965 — and the promise
Open →In the graphA premier Adventist institution, twice over: the quiet transfer of 1964, and the 2008 apology to Martin Luther King that Milton Hare accepted from the graduation stage
Open →In the graphRadar, chaff, and the Stanford lab at the center of Silicon Valley
Open →In the graphProducer — and the reason Hare was in those rooms at all
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