Interview with William H. Grier, Author of Black Rage

Richard Pyatt interviews Dr. William H. Grier, Psychiatrist at the University of California Medical School, about his recent book Black Rage, co-authored with Dr. Price M. Cobbs.

The book uses case histories to describe emotional trends and "handicaps" of black patients which demonstrate a growing hostility within African Americans to a national climate of institutionalized racism.

The book was inspired by riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. "People who were not very thoughtful about the situation asked, why is it that blacks are burning up their own homes, without realizing that the places hardly qualified as homes in the first place, they did not belong to the blacks in the second place, and probably ought to have been burned in the third, they were unfit to live in. Blacks could hardly feel a part of a community which forces them to live under such circumstances."

Grier is not concerned with devising solutions but rather would like to spur further research as well as conversation and thoughtfulness among American business and government leaders. "I think, I hope, anyway, that leaders are going to see that this growing dissatisfaction on the part of a large segment of America cannot continue because it's growing in the numbers of dissatisfied and the intensity of the dissatisfaction and that rather than attempt to convert whites to a more reasonable and humane attitude towards minorities, it is going to become a matter of national security almost that this racism, this hostility, this bigotry and so on cannot be tolerated if America is to continue and grow."

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection

WNYC archives id: 151637
Municipal archives id: T4453