Alvin F. Poussaint, Who Probed Racism’s Grip on Black Psyche, Dies at 90

Dr. Poussaint helped widen debate about Black culture and identity in books and essays and as adviser for the popular sitcom “The Cosby Show.”

February 25, 2025 at 2:32 p.m. EST

Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry Alvin F. Poussaint in Washington in 2007. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

By Brian Murphy

Alvin F. Poussaint, a psychiatrist and author who helped expand perceptions of the Black experience in America with research into the effects of racism on mental health and as script adviser for the popular sitcom “The Cosby Show,” died Feb. 24 at his home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by wife, Tina Young Poussaint, but no specific cause was noted.

Soon after finishing medical school, Dr. Poussaint (pronounced poo-SAHNT) was in the heart of the 1960s civil rights movement as a field director in Jackson, Mississippi, with the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which advocated for desegregation of medical facilities.

Dr. Poussaint carried first aid supplies during the landmark march in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. after an initial attempt ended in a bloody attack against the marchers at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Dr. Poussaint said police threatened to arrest him when he insisted on being addressed as “Doctor.”

After joining the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1969 — with the civil rights struggle in flux after the assassination of King a year earlier — Dr. Poussaint began to interpret racism as a pathology that couldn’t be swept away by laws or protests alone.

“It was part of the way the country saw itself,” he told the Boston Globe, “the way people behaved and established their own sense of worth, using Blacks and some other groups as scapegoats.”

Beginning in the early 1970s, Dr. Poussaint’s writings and speeches often spilled beyond traditional academic circles and entered public debate with ideas that combined social psychology, political theory and community activism.

He argued, in books such as “Why Blacks Kill Blacks” (1972), that racism and prejudice confronted by Black Americans were akin to trauma that can leave profound imprints on self-esteem and identity as well as fostering anger and possible violence. “Much of Black self-hatred is in reality repressed rage and a manifestation of being conditioned by fear,” he wrote.

He also appealed for a more aggressive therapeutic approach to deal with systemic racism. In an essay in Clinical Psychiatry News in 2015, after a White gunman killed nine Black churchgoers at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, Dr. Poussaint called on the American Psychiatric Association to clearly define “extreme racism” as a mental health disorder. (That distinction was not made by the association, but some defense lawyers have tried to introduce a mental health-linked defense for alleged hate crimes.)

“It’s time for mental health professionals to examine their resistance to accepting extreme racism as a symptom of serious mental illness. Such a focus in the future may prevent tragedies like the Charleston massacre,” wrote Dr. Poussaint, whose roles at Harvard Medical School over five decades included founding director of the Office of Recruitment & Multicultural Affairs.

Even as Dr. Poussaint gained attention for his scholarship, his ideas for remedies were at times polarizing. Some activists and academics questioned whether his description of deep-seated racism as a mental health malady would give a blame-shifting pass to White supremacists and others.

Meanwhile, Dr. Poussaint’s call for Black men to take greater responsibly in family life and their communities was met with complaints as being too rooted in stereotypes.

“I think a lot of these males kind of have a father hunger and actually grieve that they don’t have a father,” Dr. Poussaint told New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2007. “And I think later a lot of that turns into anger. ‘Why aren’t you with me? Why don’t you care about me?’”

Dr. Poussaint responded that he knew firsthand some of the dilemmas facing families dealing with crime and drugs. His older brother, Kenneth, was jailed several times for theft and abused drugs such as heroin. Dr. Poussaint once described lifting his drug-addled brother off the floor with a needle in his arm. Kenneth died of meningitis in 1975.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, writing in the introduction for “Why Blacks Kill Blacks,” portrayed Dr. Poussaint as “no armchair academician espousing theories and reaching conclusions from afar.” Dr. Poussaint later served as co-chairman in Massachusetts for Jackson’s unsuccessful presidential run in 1984.

That same year, Dr. Poussaint began as consultant for “The Cosby Show,” starring comedian Bill Cosby as Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, the father in an upper-middle class Black family in Brooklyn that included his wife (played by Phylicia Rashad) as a successful lawyer. The NBC show, which ran until 1992, earned Cosby the moniker of “America’s Dad” at the time.

Dr. Poussaint said his main duty on the show was helping the writers capture the right mood and tone for plot points such as bigotry and Black empowerment. Dr. Poussaint did similar work for a “The Cosby Show” spin-off, “A Different World” (1987 to 1993), and he and Cosby co-authored a 2007 book, “Come On, People: On the Path From Victims to Victors,” about stories of Black people overcoming hardship.

Some reviewers lauded the uplifting accounts, while others called the message overly simplistic. (Cosby was found guilty in 2018 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault and served two years in prison before the conviction was overturned in 2021. Dr. Poussaint had no connection to the case.)

Dr. Poussaint often said the cultural significance of “The Cosby Show” should not be overshadowed by the accusations against Cosby. The show, he told Ebony magazine, “dramatically altered the image of blacks as poor, downtrodden, yet happy-go-lucky clowns. The Huxtable family help[ed] to dispel old stereotypes and to move its audience toward more realistic perceptions. Like Whites, Blacks on television should be portrayed in a full spectrum of roles and cultural styles.”

Alvin Francis Poussaint was born in Manhattan’s East Harlem neighborhood on May 15, 1934. His father was a printer, and his mother managed the household that grew to eight children.

At age 9, Alvin contracted rheumatic fever and spent three months in a hospital and then two months in a convalescent home. He said his interactions with the doctors and nurses sparked his interest in medicine.

He received a bachelor’s degree in pharmacology from Columbia University in 1956 and earned his medical degree from Cornell University in 1960. He also received a master’s degree in pharmacology in 1964 during his medical residency at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Dr. Poussaint joined Tufts University School of Medicine faculty in 1967 and moved to Harvard two years later. In 1976, he became the health consultant for the Congressional Black Caucus. At Harvard, his roles included associate dean for student affairs. He retired in 2019.

From 1994 to 2010, he was director of the Media Center at the Judge Baker Children’s Center (now the Baker Center for Children and Families), a Boston-based group affiliated with Harvard Medical School that studies innovations in childhood education.

His other books included “Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans” (2000), written with journalist Amy Alexander, and “Black Child Care” (1975), co-authored with fellow psychiatrist James P. Comer.

Dr. Poussaint’s marriage to Ann Ashmore ended in divorce. In 1992, he married Young, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. Other survivors include their daughter; a son from his first marriage; and a sister.

Dr. Poussaint said he was often frustrated by listening to his Black patients define racism in narrow terms, such as only occurring with a physical assault or racial insult.

“When that happens, something is severely wrong,” he told the group Science for the People in 1982. “I have to help them deal with the pain of the experience of denying racism. Racism is always there. It’s always an issue.”