SAN DIEGO — Dr. William Grier, a psychiatrist who co-wrote the groundbreaking 1968 book, “Black Rage,” which offered the first psychological examination of black life in the United States, has died at age 89.

Grier’s oldest son, Geoffrey Grier, said Wednesday that his father died Thursday at a hospice care facility in Carlsbad, after suffering a brain lesion.

Grier and Price M. Cobbs, both black psychiatrists working in San Francisco in the 1960s, co-wrote “Black Rage” to explain the anger that triggered the riots after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The authors argued how the heritage of slavery contributed to the unrest decades after the end of segregation and continued to affect society as well as the personal lives of blacks. In 1969, ABC produced a TV special about the book called “To Be Black.”