The Final Call

Dr. Frances Cress Welsing: The indelible legacy of a ‘warrior scholar’

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In this photo from Sept, 21, 2008, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing receives a Community Award at the National Black LUV Festival in WDC. Photo: Wikimedia

Dr. Welsing, whose scholarship scientifically decoded White supremacy as a reaction to the fear of genetic annihilation if race mixing occurs, was born into a prominent family of Black over-achievers in Chicago. Her father, Dr. Henry Cress was a physician. His father was also a physician. Her mother, Ida Mae Griffin Cress was a schoolteacher and daughter of the founder of the Griffin Funeral Home, the first Black mortuary in Chicago.

Dr. Welsing’s sister Lorne Cress Love, the oldest of the three “Cress Girls,” was a veteran Southside community organizer who was a leader among the young people who went to Mississippi in the early 1960s as a part of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to fight for Black voting rights. Barbara Cress, the youngest sister, married Air Force pilot Robert Lawrence, the first Black astronaut, who was killed in a training exercise in 1967.

Months after Saviour’s Day 1974, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad actually made his last public appearance, wearing a kelly-green-colored F.O.I. (Fruit of Islam) uniform and fez at the Griffin mortuary, preaching the funeral of two long-time followers who came with him to Chicago from Temple No. 1 in Detroit. They were the parents of Sister Gladys Bastan, who worked in the circulation department at the Muhammad Speaks newspaper plant.

Dr. Welsing graduated from Antioch College in 1957, and five years later from Howard University Medical School, where she joined the faculty teaching pediatric psychiatry. “She was without a doubt one of our most fierce scholar warriors,” Dr. Anthony Browder, an Egyptologist and family friend told The Final Call.

“She was a voracious researcher who took every opportunity, and was constantly defending her views in the face of her many critics,” Dr. Browder said. Those critics included a classic televised encounter with popular TV host Phil Donahue, and a 1974 face off on public television’s “Black Journal” with eugenicist Dr. William Shockley in which she reportedly “eviscerated” the racist Nobel Prize winner, explaining that her theory was an attempt to “understand the behavior of White people in relation to all people of color around the world.”

Her Cress Theory on Color Confrontation and Racism, she explained, had been presented at the convention of the American Medical Association section on psychology and neurology. Racism, she explained to host Tony Brown, is “the White supremacy behavior of White people, the number one mental health problem in the nation, and the number one cause of other mental health problems.” She combined her findings about racism, she said, with what is known about genetics, with what is known about “skin whiteness.”

Dr. Welsing held fast to her conclusions, never yielding for the next 40-plus years. “As Black people we have to understand specifically what racism is,” Dr. Welsing told The Final Call in 2012. “To understand that it is a system for White genetic survival and to prevent White genetic annihilation. If we fail to understand this, we don’t understand what exactly is happening to the Black family, the attack on the Black family in general, and the attack very specifically on Black males as husbands and fathers. The White collective is not going to change because it is a survival system as a tiny minority of people on the planet.”

Put very simply, White people are a minority population on earth, whose identity traits—blue eyes, straight blonde hair, and white skin color—will be eliminated if they intermingle with any non-White populations.

“In other words, the White population on the planet is a tiny minority population, fewer than one-tenth of the people on the planet. They are genetic recessive in terms of skin coloration. Meaning, White can be genetically annihilated. White plus Black equals Colored. White plus Brown equals Colored. White plus Yellow equals Colored,” she told The Final Call.

“So the White minority is aware. I would say they have been aware since they circumnavigated the globe, found out that they were a minority, and (that) White males having sexual relations with non-White women, they found out that the children all look like the mothers, meaning the White was annihilated.”

Indeed, her groundbreaking work was “the inspiration behind FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET,” Chuck D, one of the members of the legendary Hip-Hop ensemble Public Enemy posted to his Twitter account.

Dr. Welsing first began to shape her theories when she graduated from college. She said she asked her parents for a trip to Germany as a graduation gift. She wanted to live with German people and ask up close and in person, as a new college grad, just 12 years up from World War II, “did the (German) people understand what they were doing, when they did what they did,” supporting Adolph Hitler’s genocide against Jews. She found that some folks indeed were nice to her, welcoming her into their homes, but others were “walking around doing Heil Hitler.”

Despite overwhelming evidence in every area of inter-racial contact of the evil intentions White people hold for Black people—especially in the United States—Blacks in the U.S. remain in denial because they want to be accepted by White society, just as Jews in Germany were in denial of Hitler’s evil plans, she explained.

“If we just look back in history, Adolph Hitler ran a White supremacist state in Germany. The people who were victimized by that (were) Gypsies, Black people, and Semites of the Jewish religion. Adolph Hitler said that all of these people were not White. They were not Aryan, so they were going to be killed because he was interested in having a pure Aryan population in Germany as well as the rest of Europe.

“In spite of the fact that the Semites of the Jewish religion had scholars such as (Sigmund) Freud and (Albert) Einstein, they didn’t understand what was happening. They kept saying: ‘We’re Germans.’ They wanted to be assimilated and included. They didn’t understand.

“The Semites of the Jewish religion in Germany believed that they had been assimilated, they were being assimilated from the middle of the 19th century. They felt that the barriers and the ghettoes no longer existed and that they were being allowed to attend colleges, and be more mobile in the society. Then, at a critical point, all of that was washed away. They thought they had been accepted.”

There is a Freudian/sexual component to Dr. Welsing’s theories as well, which offer compelling explanations for contemporary behavior throughout Caucasian societies in the U.S. and western Europe. The gun—known during the days of the Wild, Wild West, and proclaimed as such by former President Ronald Reagan as “the great equalizer”—is worn around the hip, in the area of the genitals, Dr. Welsing pointed out.

Guns are a compensation for penis envy Dr. Welsing explained in The Isis papers. White men often refer to one another as a “son of a gun,” and the barrel of a gun is a symbolic phallic symbol. “The firing of the gun in function achieves for White (men) the destruction of Black lives in the same way the black penis can destroy white genetic survival,” she wrote.

Dr. Welsing once even postulated an amusing theory which explained popular American sports. It was called “The Balls Theory,” which argues that in games which are played with large brown balls—basketball, football—Black players have always dominated, but in golf and tennis, sports played with small white balls, White players have always ruled. At the end of the 20th century of course Tiger Woods, and Arthur Ashe, and other modern players became notable exceptions to that rule, but it still has much currency even today.