Richard D King (psychiatrist)

Early life and education

King was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1946 to Camille and Louis King. He was the eldest of five children and was primarily raised in the Watts district of Los Angeles, California. While studying biology at Whittier College in Southern California, King also competed on the men's tennis team. Upon graduating from Whittier, King enrolled into the University of California at San Francisco and began studying for a medical degree, which he earned in 1972. While in medical school, King did an internship in Psychiatry and Child Psychiatry at the Los Angeles county-USD Medical Center and became an active member of the Nation of Islam, adopting it as his religious practice and using it as a guide to begin his community work in black neighborhoods throughout California.

Publications

In 1974 King completed a Residency in General Psychiatry at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute.

Also during the 1970s, King came under the tutelage of Dr. Alfred and Bernice Ligon at the Acquarian Spiritual Center in Los Angeles. Dr. Ligon was a metaphysicist who opened Acquarian Book Shop in 1941. The space was the oldest black bookstore in America [*] until it was destroyed during the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings.

In 1990, King published "African Origins of Biological Psychiatry." Four years later, King published this second book, Melanin: A Key to Freedom [*], which is currently in its seventh printing.

Personal

King's children include: Kent, Khadi,Jamila and Knef. He was married to Paulette Grayson-King, the mother of his two sons.