Na'im Akbar

Na'im Akbar was born Luther Benjamin Weems Jr. on April 26, 1944, in Tallahassee, Florida. He grew up in a segregated southern city, but in a community he has described as one where academic excellence was the unquestioned standard. Both of his parents were college educated, which was rare for a Black child at the time. He attended the Florida A & M University Laboratory School from kindergarten through high school, graduating in 1961, and lived in a completely African American social environment until he reached the University of Michigan. His freshman year there was his first real contact with white people. Black teachers, coaches, neighbors and father figures treated achievement as ordinary, and that background sits behind his later insistence that Black people be studied from their strengths and not only their wounds.

At Michigan he earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology, the doctorate in clinical psychology. The Black student movement there, including the Black Action Movement strike that closed classes for three weeks in the late 1960s, drew him in. He has said that this environment produced the early conversations about a Black psychology and about taking apart the psychology he had been taught. His dissertation, "Power Themes among Negro and White Paranoid and non-Paranoid Schizophrenics," led him to question the accepted definitions of mental health for Black people, which grew out of European American psychology. He names that period as the defining point for his later work. In the 1970s he published his first critiques of the Eurocentric psychological tradition, arguing that it maintained the intellectual oppression of African Americans, and he criticized the pathology perspectives that dominated the literature on them.

His career moved between the university, the Black professional association and the religious community. After Michigan he went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he designed and taught the college's first Black psychology course and built what was probably the first Black psychology program at a historically Black college or university. He became department chair within two years. He then left to help start the Nation of Islam's Office of Human Development in Chicago. He changed his name in this period; one account has him briefly known as Luther X and then as Na'im Akbar after joining the community led by Imam Warith Deen Mohammed, where he served as a special aide. Two years later he returned to teaching at Norfolk State University, again building Black psychology courses, and in 1979 he joined Florida State University, back in his hometown. He taught there for about 28 years and retired in 2008. He joined the Association of Black Psychologists in 1971, served on its board repeatedly, and was its president from 1987 to 1988. He was also associate editor of the Journal of Black Psychology for eight years and sat on the editorial board of the Journal of Black Studies.

Akbar's later work moves from critique toward construction. He proposed a classification of mental disorders for African-centered psychology, and in Light from Ancient Africa he traces the roots of psychology to Kemet. Wade Nobles, in his foreword to that book, calls it a contribution to a "Re-Africanization of Psychology Project." In the late 1980s he founded Mind Productions, a publishing company, and Na'im Akbar Consultants, so that his teaching would reach people beyond the classroom. Throughout, his method is to ask who defined health, on whose evidence, and for whose benefit. He then builds institutions such as courses, programs, associations and presses that hold a different answer.