Robert Hughes Brisbane was a social scientist and historian who wrote about the civil rights movement in its early years. He spent much of his life defying unfair racial practices and devising strategies against them. He was born in Jacksonville, Fla., and raised in Harlem amid the political and literary ferment of the period. After receiving a doctorate in political science from Harvard University in 1949, Mr. Brisbane was recruited by Morehouse College. He was well known beyond the Atlanta campus of Morehouse as the author of the textbook "The Black Vanguard: Origins of the Negro Social Revolution, 1900-1960" and a later book, "Black Activism: Racial Revolution in the United States, 1954-1970."