On December 6, 1961, roughly 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, and in 1961 wrote his best-known piece "The Wretched of the Earth". As a psychiatrist in Algeria, he joined the NLF (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.
