TALLAHASSEE,, Fla., Jan. 10 (UPI) -- Glayde Whitney, a Florida State University psychology professor who created a national controversy by writing blacks are inferior to whites, has died. He was 62.
Officials at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital said Thursday he died on Wednesday of undisclosed natural causes.
Whitney wrote the foreword to the 1999 book by former Ku Klux Klansmen and politician David Duke, "My Awakening." Duke called for separate nations for blacks and whites and said blacks are inferior to whites.
In the foreword, Whitney called the book "a painstakingly documented, academically excellent work ... that has the potential to raise tremendous controversy and change the very course of history."
Robert Contreras, chairman of the Department of Psychology, said controversy erupted both on campus and nationally.
"I think he thought he was doing the right thing," Contreras said. "I don't think he was trying to make people angry. I think he was trying to make people think differently. But he did upset a lot of people and he did make a lot of people angry."
Whitney, who had bachelor's and doctorate degrees from the University of Minnesota, was known for work in genetics and behavior in mice.
Whitney once told a meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association blacks were predisposed to violence.
"Like it or not, it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis that some, perhaps much, of the race difference in murder rate is caused by genetic differences in contributory variables such as low intelligence, lack of empathy, aggressive acting out and impulsive lack of foresight," he said.
The Intelligence Report, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., quoted Whitney as saying in a meeting in 1998 blacks "were bigger in bone, smaller in brain."
