Frantz Fanon (, US: ; French: [fʁɑ̃ts fanɔ̃]; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist, political philosopher, revolutionary, and writer from the French colony of Martinique, today a French department with equal status and right as any other area of metropolitan France, whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of Independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. For more than five decades, the life and works of Frantz Fanon have inspired national liberation movements and other radical political organizations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury. In What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life And Thought, Lewis R. Gordon remarked that

Fanon's contributions to the history of ideas are manifold. He is influential not only because of the originality of his thought but also because of the astuteness of his criticisms. He developed a profound social existential analysis of antiblack racism, which led him to identify conditions of skewed rationality and reason in contemporary discourses on the human being.
Fanon published numerous books, including The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This influential work focuses on what he believes is the necessary role of violence by activists in conducting decolonization struggles.