The purpose of this research is to examine the content and implications of Black Rage, by Grier and Cobbs, with a view toward relating the book to the enterprise of multicultural counseling. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas emerging in the work and the means by which those ideas emerge, and then to integrate professional commentary into the issues in a way that will indicate potential practical interventions on the part of school counselors that will facilitate educational, occupational, and career development for majority and minority student groups.
What must first be understood about Black Rage is that it was written in a pivotal year of American history, 1968. After the rioting that followed the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., came the loss of spirit in the whole civil rights movement reflected by the rise of ultra black nationalism and black power. The Kerner Commission Report, issued in February 1968, agreed with Malcolm, who had been murdered as well, that white racism was the chief cause of black violence in civil disorders (Almanac, 1977). It was the same sense of agreement that moved Senator Harris to declare that the fundamental social and psychological problem for blacks was that they were living in a white man's culture (1968). Moreover, long before the riots occurred there had been an exodus of sympathetic, middle class whites from the civil rights movement toward the antiwar movement, which split the agenda of social revolution and reform. Such defections were another symptom of another, more hostile exodus of white families from inner cities to the suburbs.
It in this context that Black Rage must be considered, and in this context that the persistent relevance of Black Rage into the 1990s must be understood. To the degree the book boasts psychiatrists as authors, it can be taken as a medical or health care book, and its orientation to explicating the psychology of Afri...