[3] Robert Val Guthrie was born in Chicago on February 14, 1932, but moved to Lexington, Kentucky, when his father became the principal at Dunbar High School.
[2] While stationed at Sampson Air Force Base during his military service in the 1950s, Guthrie met his wife, Elodia Sexton, a nursing student from Guatemala.
He left this post in the 1980s, starting a private practice called Psychiatric Associates of South Bay, which focused on the needs of minorities in San Diego.
[2] After retiring from this post, he taught psychology of the black experience at San Diego State University for one class per semester, and spent time putting his stories and milestones in his life together for a memoir.
The 2nd Edition of the book was published in 1998, with responses to new developments in the field, such as The Bell Curve which suggested racial differences in IQ and intelligence between races.
[1] In Even the Rat Was White, Guthrie profiled pioneering Black psychologists and social scientists such as Francis Cecil Sumner, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, Allison Davis, Inez Beverly Prosser, Herman George Canady, Oran Wendle Eagleson, and Ruth Winifred Howard, as well as mentors of Black psychologists like G. Stanley Hall at Clark University who helped create a pipeline for African Americans to earn PhDs in psychology and join university faculties.
Regarding Even the Rat Was White, he stated that the book is "an excellent piece of historiography that offers a good, hard look at racism in the development of psychology," and that without it, many of the profiled Black psychologists might have been forgotten.