Remembering Frantz Fanon

On this day, 50 years ago, Frantz Fanon passed away. A psychiatrist, Pan-Africanist, writer, and revolutionary, he was born in Martinique in 1925. In 1952 he published Black Skin, White Masks, which exposed the negative effects of colonization on the mental state of subjugated peoples. 

 As a psychiatrist in Algeria, he joined the FLN (National  Liberation Front), which waged a war of independence against  France. In 1961, Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth,  a book on decolonization that has remained a classic  and influenced revolutionaries the world over,  including Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Che Guevara, and  the South African Steve Biko, founder of the  Black Consciousness movement. Fanon died in  Maryland, where he had sought treatment for leukemia, and  was buried in Algeria.