Whitney was a regular contributor to American Renaissance, a racist magazine emphasizing IQ studies and eugenics, and an active member the Council of Conservative Citizens, the reincarnation of the White Citizens Councils formed in the 1950s to resist desegregation of Southern schools.

He also taught psychology at Florida State University for more than 31 years, researching the genetic mechanisms underlying behavior. His main finding was that science supposedly "proves" that blacks are generally less intelligent than whites.

Whitney gained national notoriety when he wrote a fawning introduction to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke's 1999 book, My Awakening.

Whitney concluded that Duke had relied on "good science" in contending that blacks should be separated from whites. He called Duke a "seeker of truth" not unlike some of history's greatest thinkers, including "Socrates and Isaac Newton."

"One of his honest truths," Whitney wrote of Duke, is that "racial egalitarianism is the scientific equivalent of the flat-Earth theory."

In lieu of flowers, Whitney's family asked that donations be sent to the Charles Martel Society, the self-described "intellectual home of Western nationalism."

The recently created society puts out a slick, academic-looking journal called The Occidental Quarterly, edited by a Who's Who of the radical right and bankrolled by William H. Regnery II, the reclusive Chicago millionaire who is heir to the Regnery publishing fortune.

The second issue, published soon after Whitney's death, ends with a lengthy book review by Whitney in which he — no irony intended — picks apart a thesis that "smacks of ideology more than science."

Whitney's children, Timothy and Scott, asked that "ole Doc" be remembered as "the double-gun toting, intellectual, un-conforming, truth-telling gentleman that he is, was, and always will be."