Frances Cress Welsing (YouTube)
(Updated 01-05-2016) Frances Cress Welsing, a psychiatrist and controversial race theorist whose theories ignited widespread controversy, has died at the age of 80, according to media reports.
Welsing died about 5:50 a.m. Jan. 2 following complications from a stroke she suffered earlier in the week, according to the Washington Informer, which cited confirmation from her relatives.
The news prompted an outpouring of tributes from many who praised her mentorship and scholarship.
“The void she leaves has no boundary,” tweeted activist and radio host Harry Allen on announcing Welsing’s death on Saturday.
Rapper Chuck D, of Public Enemy fame, said Dr. Welsing inspired their 1990 album “Fear of a Black Planet,” considered one of the seminal hip-hop albums of all time.
“RIP to the elder Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, the inspiration behind FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET,” the artist wrote on his Twitter feed.
Marc Lamont Hill, a Morehouse college professor and CNN contributor, was among several academicians who noted Welsing’s intellectual legacy.
“Dr. Frances Cress Welsing represents a tradition of REAL Black Public intellectual work and community scholarship that must be protected,” he said in a tribute. “There is a whole generation of Black people, many of whom didn’t have access to formal academic spaces, who were trained by Dr. Welsing.”
On March 18, 1935, Frances Louella Cress was born in Chicago the second of three daughters to
Henry N. Cress, a physician, and Ida Mae Griffen, a teacher. After earning her bachelor’s degree from Antioch College in 1957, she went to receive her medical degree from Howard University in 1962.
Welsing stayed in Washington, D.C., where she practiced both general and pediatric psychiatry. In addition to her role as an educator—she worked as an assistant professor of pediatrics at Howard University College of Medicine for more than a decade—she launched a private practice in 1967 and worked as a staff physician for the D.C. Department of Human Services and as the clinical director of two schools for emotionally troubled children for several decades.
It was while she taught at Howard that Welsing launched what was considered an atomic bomb into the cultural and intellectual arenas when she published the 1970 essay “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy).”
“As a psychiatrist, and working in a hospital trying to treat Black people and White people, that the majority of the problems that Black patients had in psychiatric hospitals when you took a history, you’d run smack into racism. So I knew I had to understand racism to help solve the mental health problems of Black people,” she said of her reasons for the paper during a 1985 appearance on “The Phil Donahue Show.”
Welsing posited global racism (specifically White supremacy) had its roots in the deficiency of melanin—the pigment-producing substance in skin—in Whites and their fear of genetic annihilation. Because white skin is the result of a genetic recessive trait, pure “Whiteness” would be easily decimated by interracial mixing, she said.
Because of their “numerical inadequacy” and “color inferiority,” White people may have defensively developed “an uncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression” towards people of color – and particularly Black people since their highest melanin content gives them the greatest genetic potential to annihilate Whites, the essay suggested.
Welsing’s 1974 debate on PBS’s “Tony Brown’s Journal” against William Shockley, a physicist and eugenics proponent who theorized that Blacks were genetically inferior, further shot her into public notoriety.
Welsing further developed her ideas of White supremacy and its permutations in global culture and society in 1990’s “The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors.” Among other things, she said White fears of annihilation were focused on the Black male.
“In the White supremacy mind-set, consciously or subconsciously, Black males must be destroyed in significant numbers – just as they were in earlier days when there was widespread open lynching and castration of Black males, or during the Tuskegee Syphilis Study from 1932 to 1972 when a large number of Black males were used and destroyed by Whites,” she wrote.
Welsing also suggested that homosexuality was something imposed on Black males by Whites to reduce the Black population.
That theory and the others posed in her book were criticized, but she was praised for her overall intellectual bravery and her focus on the nurturing of Black children and families as a way to combat White supremacy.
“Black people have to get it to the mind frame that ‘Black’ means dignity and being serious, that people respect one another,” said Welsing in a 2013 interview with Knowshi.com. “This is going to be the strength of Black people—valuing themselves, respecting themselves and having dignity.”
Memorial services for Dr. Frances Cress Welsing will take place 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 23 at Howard University’s Cramton Auditorium, 2455 6th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.