Alvin F. Poussaint, Pioneering Expert on Black Mental Health, Dies at 90

A psychiatrist at Harvard and an adviser to Jesse Jackson and Bill Cosby, he challenged Black Americans to stand up to systemic racism. Alvin F. Poussaint, a psychiatrist who, after providing medical care to the civil rights movement in 1960s Mississippi, went on to play a leading role in debates about Black culture and politics in the 1980s and ’90s through his research on the effects of racism on Black mental health, died on Monday at his home in Chestnut Hill, Mass. He was 90. His wife, Tina Young Poussaint, confirmed the death. Dr. Poussaint, who spent most of his career as a professor and associate dean at Harvard Medical School, first came to public prominence in the late 1970s, as the energy and optimism of the civil rights movement were giving way to white backlash and a skepticism about the possibility of Black progress in a white-dominated society. In books like “Why Blacks Kill Blacks” (1972) and “Black Child Care” (1975), he walked a line between those on the left who blamed persistent racism for the ills confronting Black America and those on the right who said that, after the civil rights era, it was up to Black people...