Often I wonder why Fredric Wertham is such a reviled figure in American comic books:

[Wertham] believed that people’s behavior was partly determined by their environment, in this respect dissenting from orthodox Freudianism, and some of his work, on the psychological effects of segregation on African-Americans, was used in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education.

The majority of the cases he cites in his book Seduction of the Innocent were after all examples of superhero comics, with all the commentary you could give the genre about the US fascination with violence.

Of course, I seem to remember that Scott McCloud had a more balanced image of the man in one of his books ...