E. Franklin Frazier 1894-1962

Sociologist, educator, writer

At a Glance…

Studied at Clark University

Atlanta: Acceptance and Expulsion

The Chicago School

Received Guggenheim Fellowship

Selected writings

Sources

When E. Franklin Frazier became head of Howard’s sociology department in 1934, he emerged a vital force in promoting the scientific study of his field. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Frazier brought, during his 25-year post at Howard, modern analytical and quantitative techniques of the “Chicago School.” Throughout his life he remained both scholar and activist, delivering, in his fiery essays and speaking appearances, sharp criticisms of capitalist society and middle class black America.

Frazier refuted the idea that African cultural traits survived among African Americans—a position that made him an uncompromising opponent of scholars from Melville Herskovits to James Weldon Johnson. Upholding socialism, he disdained many black elites and the members of New Negro movement whom he believed were more concerned with success in white markets rather than the struggle of the black masses. Through his famous studies of the black family, race, and religious life, he sought to help formulate values that promoted a consciousness of cultural self-determinism that could guide blacks in their goal of assimilation while preserving the desirable elements of the past.

One of five children, Edward Franklin Frazier was born the son of James and Mary Clark Frazier, on September 24, 1894, in Baltimore, Maryland. An uneducated man who taught himself to read, James Frazier, taught his children virtues of hard work and frugality. When Franklin was ten his father died, leaving Mary to support the family as a maid. Between his studies Franklin sold newspapers and delivered groceries. In June of 1912, he graduated from Colored High School, receiving the institution’s only annual Howard University scholarship.

Nicknamed “Plato” by fellow students, Frazier’s delved into his liberal arts education at Howard with Spartan devotion. His studies included courses in mathematics, physical science, literature, Latin, Greek, German, and social sciences. Howard philosophy professor Alain Locke described Frazier, as quoted in E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, “one of the most consistently competent and painstaking students I have taught in four years of my experience at the institution.”

At Howard Frazier’s desire for a classical and well-rounded education coincided with a developing interest

At a Glance…

Born Edward Franklin Frazier, September 24, 1894, in Baltimore, MD; died of a heart attack, May 17, 1962; son of James Frazier, a bank messenger, and Mary Frazier; married Marie Brown. Education: B.A., Howard University, cum laude, 1916; M.A., Clark University, 1920; Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1931.

Taught a summer semester at Fort Valley High and Industrial School, 1917; worked as a YMCA secretary at Fort Humphreys, VA, 1918; same year published first essay “God and War;” conducted a study of New York city longshoremen 1920–21; traveled to Denmark to study folk schools and cooperatives 1921–22; served as director of the Atlanta School of Social Work 1922–27; taught at Fisk University 1929–34; served as director of Howard University’s social work department 1934–59,

Awards: Opportunity magazine’s first prize for essay 1925; won Van Vechten prize for best contribution in Opportunity, 1928; won Ansfield award for The Negro Family in the United States, 1939; elected president of American Sociological Association 1948; received the American Sociological Association’s Maclver Award.

in socialism. Because of his opposition to the religious and conservative views of Howard sociologist Kelly Miller, Frazier avoided taking sociology courses at Howard. He deplored Miller’s religious eulogizing and his lack of scientific methodology. Outside the classroom, Frazier’s deep interest in politics and race were stimulated by the left-wing ideas of the campus Intercollegiate Socialist Society and the pages of the socialist publication the Messenger.

Extremely active, Frazier joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Drama, Social Science, German, and Political Science clubs; in 1915, he served as class president. Though he found the university’s religious speakers uninspiring, Howard offered Frazier a higher degree of personal freedom and relaxed social restraints that were unknown in Southern black universities. At Howard, as Anthony M. Platt observed in, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, Frazier “found a new world that must have confirmed and given purpose to the rebellious experience of youth.”

After Frazier graduated from Howard cum laude with a bachelors degree in arts and sciences, he secured a job teaching math at Tuskegee Institute, not far from Selma, Alabama. For a freethinker and serious young scholar of classical background, Frazier’s short tenure proved a period of personal ideological struggle. Booker T. Washington’s successor Robert Russa Moton placed fierce emphasis on vocational training of students which, in their organized cadres, resembled disciplined military units.

One afternoon while Frazier walked across campus with several books under his arm, the school’s director of the academic department stopped the young scholar, admonishing him that white visitors might interpret the open display of books as a deviation from the institution’s vocational philosophy. Intended as a sign of rebellion against Tuskegee’s anti-intellectual outlook, Frazier displayed bricks on his desk, along with some cotton and a bale of hay.

Leaving Tuskegee in 1917, Frazier taught for a summer term at Fort Valley High and Industrial School. Drafted into the armed forces a few months later, he opposed joining an “imperialistic conflict” which ignored democratic rights for African Americans. Though he registered for the draft, Frazier avoided military service until the summer 1918, when he served at Camp Humphreys, Virginia, as a Young Men’s Christian Association business secretary—a program operated under the auspices of the War Department’s War Work Council. Frazier’s bitter opposition to the war prompted him to write his first major publication, “God and War.” A 15-page pamphlet, “God and War” emerged as one of the first public anti-war statements written by African American intellectual.

Studied at Clark University

In 1919 Frazier received a fellowship to attend Clark University, in Massachusetts. His studies concentrated primarily upon social science, and included statistics, philosophy, and neurology. “At Clark,” wrote Anthony Platt in E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, “Frazier not only had his first serious introduction to the literature and ideas of sociology but also learned a new language. The conventions of a academic sociology required both a specialized vocabulary and at least an appearance of dispassionate objectivity.”

Though two of his most influential sociology instructors, professors G. Stanley Hall and Frank Hankins, were adherents of a scientific racism that sought to prove the superiority of the Nordic race, Frazier completed his studies without open protest. Despite his objections, he accrued vital knowledge in the scientific constructs and study of sociology. His master’s thesis, “New Currents of Thought Among the Colored People of America,” remained testament to his increasing concern of the race problem.

After graduating from Clark in 1920, Frazier won a research fellowship to the New York School of Social Work, and for next two years conducted a study of the 82 longshoremen, on New York City’s waterfront. Frazier’s ground breaking study examined the workers in both their work and social environments. From 1921 to 1922, he traveled to Denmark as fellow of the Scandinavian Foundation. On a stipend of $1,000, he studied the Danish rural folk schools and cooperative enterprises. Frazier returned to America with the hope that rural education and cooperative businesses could serve as a model for developing a “democratization of wealth” among poor Southern blacks. Until 1925, he continued to argue the importance of African American cooperatives in creating economic growth through small amounts of capital.

Atlanta: Acceptance and Expulsion

In 1922 Frazier accepted a position as director of the Atlanta School of Social Work at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Upon his arrival he worked diligently—as administrator, teacher, recruiter, and fund-raiser—to upgrade the school’s small, understaffed social work program. Originally dependent upon Morehouse for providing classrooms and offices and one part-time instructor, Frazier’s efforts resulted in the incorporation of the Atlanta School of Social Work as a independent program in 1924.

In the summer of 1923, Frazier took first graduate courses at the University of Chicago. One of his instructors was the renowned sociologist Robert E. Park. The influence of Park later emerged in Frazier’s 1925 award-winning article, “Social Equality and the Negro,” for the Urban league’s Opportunity magazine. In The Mind and Mood of Black America, historian S. P. Fullinwinder outlined the central argument of Frazier’s article: “The Negro is caught in a vicious circle, he has been categorized as an inferior, and, because so categorized by the dominant culture, he has enmeshed himself in a caste system which maintains his economic and cultural inferiority in fact. Fullinwinder, added, that “so far as Frazier was concerned, the only thing that could break down this deadly categorization was increased social intercourse between the races.” Concerned with role of status conflict among blacks, Frazier repudiated the older generation of race men who believed that the differences of between the races stemmed from peculiar African endowments. As James O. Young concluded, in Black Writers of the Thirties, “Frazier thought the black America’s problems were essentially a part of the larger problems of the dominant society.”

Because of the militant tone of his writings, Frazier soon faced the wrath of the Atlanta University’s white faculty and board of trustees. In 1926 the school asked for his resignation. Refusing to resign, he fought to retain his job—a stance that eventually forced the board to fire him. To avoid controversy and maintain its image, the university reported that Frazier had resigned. Frazier’s departure, however, would not remain out of the light of controversy. Before leaving Atlanta in 1927, he published, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” an article he had written in 1924.

Published in the June 1927 issue of Forum, the article brought a storm of protest in the white South. In the essay Frazier compared, as Franklin G. Edwards wrote in E. Franklin Frazier, “the mechanisms which operate in prejudiced behavior with those of which characterize mental illness.” When repudiations of the article appeared in the Atlanta press, the Frazier’s were threatened with lynching. A quick departure followed, with Frazier leaving Atlanta with a .45 in his belt.

The Chicago School

In June of 1927, Frazier acquired an $800 grant to attend the University of Chicago. Studying under the mentors of the “Chicago School of Sociology,” he received instruction from Robert Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Ellsworth Faris. As Anthony M. Platt observed, in E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, the University of Chicago provided Frazier with “a lively and encouraging intellectual atmosphere within the department, a close relationship between professors and students, who knew they were the pioneers of a new kind of research and scholarship in sociology.” In 1927 Frazier began his study the Negro Family in Chicago. Based on the “social disorganization theory,” the study related how African Americans had suffered a series of shocks, beginning with their original African enslavement, followed by trans-Atlantic voyage, slavery, emancipation, and finally their migration to urban centers, where they experienced a conflict with their former rural way of life.

During the same year he launched his Chicago study, Frazier voiced his opposition to the New Negro movement of the Harlem Renaissance. In an essay written for the Urban League’s Ebony and Topaz, he spoke out against the argument existing among blacks who advocated a unique black culture and those who sought conformity to white western aesthetic standards. Never one to associate himself with the Harlem scene, Frazier viewed the two extremes as an “over-simplified struggle.” Recognizing the vast grey area existing between the two positions, he called for the creation of a “group efficiency” among blacks by which the individual could acquire group status and “fuller participation in American culture.”

According to Frazier, blacks could not advance by romanticizing the crude rural culture exemplified in evangelical Christianity or the sorrow songs of spirituals and blues. Conversely, he believed nothing could be gained by imitating white bourgeoisie lifestyles and art. Though he never offered a coherent plan for formulating a modern African American culture to elevate blacks in the modern industrial society, Frazier did discern the complexity in the development of a integrated culture allowing blacks individual identity while seeking full participation within in mainstream America.

After graduating with his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1929, Frazier began a five-year position at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At Fisk he opposed the political outlook of the university’s social science department director, Charles S. Johnson, one of the founders of the Harlem Renaissance and editor of the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine. Though he despised Johnson’s liberal politics and his associations with white philanthropists, he finished his tenure without publicly attacking his elder associate. While at Fisk Frazier published his first books in 1932, the Negro Family in Chicago and The Free Negro, and 12 articles that appeared in such periodicals as Current History, Opportunity, American Journal of Sociology, and The Journal Of Negro History.

In 1934 Frazier accepted a job as director of Howard University’s sociology department. Replacing the ailing Kelly Miller, Frazier set out to restructure the entire curriculum. A long-standing adversary of Miller, Frazier, as Fullinwinder explained in Mind and Mood, “had nothing but contempt for the type of moralizing that had been passing as science.” During his twelve-year residence at Howard, Frazier contributed to a number of studies, including Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s Harlem Commission study which investigated the 1935 Harlem riot. In 1939 he served as one of several scholars who provided criticism for Swedish economist Gunnar Mydral’s study, American Dilemma.

That same year, Frazier published his famous, The Negro in the United States, which won the Ansfield award. Based upon his earlier studies of the Negro family, the work drew heavily on history, sociology, social psychology, and Afro-American studies. It dealt with such themes as the historical legacy of the matriarchal black family and the tradition of the mulatto “brown middle class.” Countering the dominant scientific racists of the day, Frazier’s work explained deviant behavior and poverty among blacks in sociological terms, attributing such problems to environment and institutionalized racism rather than biological determinism.

Frazier’s study viewed the migration to northern cities as a period of both destruction and rebirth—an environment in which African American rural culture and familial cohesiveness would periodically breakdown. Following his socialist ideology, he believed the early stage of poverty and dislocation would be followed by a prosperous period of black industrial unionization. Blacks would then abandon “brown middle-class” values expounded by African American conservative spokesmen and intellectuals who Frazier believed prevented the progress of the black masses in order to maintain their own positions.

Received Guggenheim Fellowship

A year after the appearance of The Negro Family in the United States, Frazier published Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States. A personality study of black youths in Washington, DC, and Louisville, Kentucky, “Frazier’s analysis,” wrote G. Franklin Edwards in E. Franklin Frazier, “took account of the socialization of influences provided by the family, church, school, and neighborhoods.” In 1940 Frazier received John Guggenheim Foundation fellowship grant to study race relations in Brazil which produced the paper “A Comparison of Negro-White Relations in Brazil and the United States,” in 1944. Four years later, he became the first African American to serve as president of the American Sociological Society, and subsequently published The Negro in the United States.

In 1949 Frazier stepped down as head of Howard’s sociology department. Between 1951 and 1953, he served as chief of the division of applied sciences of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). During the 1950s he spent two years in Paris and traveled to Africa and the Middle East. In 1957 he published Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World, and his most controversial study Black Bourgeoisie. First published in France as Bourgeoisie Noire in 1955, the book’s scathing criticism of the failure of the black middle class evoked a bitter response among many whites and African Americans. By exposing the black middle as largely dependent upon white collar jobs and capital, Frazier sought to dispel the myths behind the so-called strides made by black businessmen and their vision for a separate black economy. Written in 1962, and posthumously published in 1964, Frazier’s last work The Negro Church in America described how, out of the oppression of slavery, the church became a uniquely American institution which had a consistent role in looking after the welfare of the African American masses.

During the last decade of his life, Frazier dedicated himself to the world struggle of people of African descent. His last years were spent speaking out against African American intellectuals who he believed lacked the foresight and knowledge of their African counterparts. “Frazier was hopeful,” observed Platt in E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, “that a new ‘international community’ was in the process, that ‘a world based upon federated cultures’ was in the making.” Frazier began to suffer from terminal cancer. He also faced pressures from the U.S. State Department which placed him under investigation for being affiliated with several subversive organizations. He died of a heart attack on May 17, 1962.

As an activist intellectual, Frazier emerged in the late 1920s as a militant voice in the struggle for equality and racial identity. Throughout the 1930s until the last months of his life, he remained a radical visionary. In his last essay, “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual,” published in Negro Digest, Frazier admonished blacks to “leave a worthwhile memorial—in science, in art, in literature, in sculpture, in music—of our having been here.” In his sociological studies and fiery essays, Frazier has gained an enduring place in the memorial of African American intellectual and cultural history.

Selected writings

The Negro Family in Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1931.

The Free Negro Family, Fisk University Press, 1932.

The Negro Family in the United States, University Chicago Press, 1939.

Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality and Development in the Middle States, Schocken Books, 1940.

The Negro in the United States, 1949.

Bourgeoisie Noire, Plon, (Paris), 1955.

Black Bourgeoisie, The Free Press, 1957.

Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World, A.A. Knopf, 1957.

The Negro Church in America, Schocken Books, 1964.

Sources

Books

Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, edited by August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Bobbs-Merrill Co.,Inc., 1971.

Edwards, Franklin G., E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations: Selected Writings, University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Fullinwinder, S. P., The Mind and Mood of Black America, Dorsey Press, 1969.

Platt, Anthony M., E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Young, James O., Black Writers of the Thirties, Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Periodicals

Negro Digest, February, 1962.

—John Cohassey

Frazier, E. Franklin 1894-1962

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Franklin Frazier, one of the most prominent African American sociologists of the early twentieth century, studied at Howard University (BA 1916), Clark University (MA 1920), and the University of Chicago (PhD 1931). After completing his studies he spent most of his career at Howard University, where he became the chairperson of the Department of Sociology in 1934. He remained at Howard until his death. His central contribution to sociology was the formalizing of a research tradition on the African American family, which he first began to pursue seriously in his dissertation, “The Negro Family in Chicago.” That study resulted in a book of the same title, published in 1932. Frazier expanded his contributions on the topic by publishing The Negro Family in the United States (1939) and Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940). He also contributed to the field of race relations and race theory more generally, perhaps best exemplified by his publications “Sociological Theory and Race Relations” (1947) and Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957).

Frazier’s primary data sources were case histories and census statistics. Rather than employing micro-level analyses, however, he utilized this material to construct social organizational portraits of the African American family and, more generally, African American social life. As he conducted most of his research in the midst of the twentieth-century rural-to-urban migration of African Americans, Frazier’s social organizational perspective allowed him to offer robust and penetrating commentaries about the means of mechanisms of their adjustment to the hyper-industrializing urban sphere—the manner by which African Americans adjusted to industrialized urban societies after leaving the largely rural South. In doing so, he emphasized the social organizational shortcomings of the African American community as it transferred to a mostly northern and urban milieu.

Frazier essentially regarded African American migration to the city as an adaptational challenge for the black American family, and he argued that a history of social disorganization in the South, followed by turbulent efforts at reorganization in the nonsouthern, urban sphere, encapsulated the situation of the black American family’s confrontation with modern urban America. Frazier believed that the hardships of social and economic adjustment were the causal factors of crime, vice, illegitimacy, and delinquency. Because he asserted that social disorganization and pathology were a result of the African American community’s adjustment to new geographic terrain, Frazier was regarded by many later readers of his work as a pioneering conservative voice on the cultural dimensions of African American life. In fact, Frazier’s work has been regarded as the precursor to later works such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s highly controversial 1960s-era study “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” which argued that the pathology extant in lower-income African American families was largely due to the absence of an adult male figure.

Frazier was not a cultural theorist to the same extent as certain other scholars of African American life in the early twentieth century (e.g., Allison Davis, St. Claire Drake, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston). However, his emphases in cultural analysis centered on what he perceived to be pathological and maladaptive dimensions of African American family and social life. His assertion that disorganization and pathology were prominent features of African American urban life was partly based on his embracing of the idea that African Americans did not retain any firm cultural roots in Africa. Thus, they were left without a rich, historically grounded cultural foundation in the United States, other than that produced in response to slavery. Accordingly, he regarded African Americans as consistently hampered by racism and social marginalization such that many developed cultural traits that were, if not fatalistic, at least certainly not conducive to social advancement in modern American society.

Quite early in his career, Frazier stressed the impossibility of African culture having endured the middle passage from Africa to slavery in the Western Hemisphere. He maintained this argument through investigations (albeit preliminary) of African American religious expression, social thoughts and ideologies, and social practices. Accordingly, he emphasized that the objective of formal education for black Americans should be to bind them to the American experience rather than aim to identify and proliferate some notion of cultural distinctiveness. Frazier’s logic in arguing that black Americans were, foremost, products of the American experience was grounded in his consideration of the history of black Americans as a series of critical social shocks. The order of shocks was (1) the enslavement of blacks on the coast of Africa, (2) the middle passage, (3) the slave experience itself, and (4) a profound state of social disorganization following emancipation.

To Frazier, the product of this pattern of shock was a folk culture, largely exemplified by a southern-based, lower-income, black American constituency that was struggling to reconcile their awkward status in the American social landscape. In his doctoral dissertation and some early research, Frazier pointed out that the African American folk culture emanating from slavery and the postemancipation period was an expression of “surrender” to white America in terms of attitude and acceptance of life. He believed that this resulted in the black community’s durable designation as a subaltern caste in American social structure.

Frazier’s remedy for this condition was the cultivation of a form of race consciousness that could help fuel African Americans’ motivation for social advancement. However, Frazier maintained that an appropriate race consciousness was not grounded in a shared cognizance of primordially derived cultural characteristics; instead, he argued that it should take the form of a sociopolitical orientation that could motivate a downtrodden constituency in American society to improve its social status. Hence, for Frazier the significance of fostering race consciousness was not what it did to reify any notion of a distinct African American culture, but rather its use as a basis for asserting the growth and proliferation of pragmatic strategies for social uplift.

Despite what may appear to be an extremely critical perspective on the social and psychological dynamics of African American life, Frazier maintained that the conditions affecting the African American community were structural in nature and not in any way derived from inherent racial traits. Accordingly, despite the problems that African Americans encountered in adjusting to the urban sphere, Frazier asserted that this migration created opportunities for the social and cultural renewal of black Americans (especially as the urban terrain encouraged black Americans to break with the fatalistic folk culture proliferating throughout their southern, more rural, social experience). He also believed that a more constructive and positive race consciousness would develop due to the narrowing of social distance between African Americans in the urban domain. Finally, Frazier also believed that urbanization would destroy any retention of mythical notions of blackness that had been cultivated throughout history.

Frazier’s carefully nuanced approach to race consciousness was an indication of the nascent nationalist tendencies that underlay both his scholarship and his civic commitments. These tendencies emerged more directly in some of Frazier’s later work, especially his classic Black Bourgeoisie (1957), in which he argued that the African American middle and upper classes were engaged in forms of socialization and consumption parallel to those pursued by the mainstream American middle and upper classes. While Frazier did ascribe to the idea that black Americans had to assimilate into the cultural and social fabric of mainstream American society, he also maintained that such assimilation had to take shape in a critical rather than a mimical fashion. By that he meant that black Americans should not simply adopt the full range of cultural and social practices engaged by white Americans, but instead selectively appropriate those that would reap some clear benefits for black Americans in garnering firm and secure status in mainstream culture. Although it was widely read, Black Bourgeoisie was a highly polemic and, in comparison to Frazier’s other works, lightly researched commentary.

Because Franklin’s methodological tools were specifically suited for macro-level analysis, he was not well equipped to consider the personal situation of the black American. His objectives, however, did not necessarily concern that perspective. He viewed the black community as a caste constituency in American society. Therefore, his research emphasis was on the black American community as a whole, not its individual members. Moreover, his agenda for social change did not consist of strategies for individual adjustment to mainstream social and cultural patterns in American society; instead, he attempted to articulate a vision of racial advancement that could evaluate the entire population of black Americans.

To a large extent, under the auspices of Frazier and others of his era (e.g., Charles S. Johnson, St. Claire Drake, Horace Cayton, and Allison Davis) black American social thought moved from polemically oriented, philosophically grounded defenses of the humanity of African Americans to more formal scientific investigations, analyses, and model constructions of the state of the black American condition in a rapidly modernizing American society. Frazier’s assertions about African Americans’ loss of African cultural traits helped him to view the black American condition in terms of future possibilities—the most immediate being its complete and permanent stake in American society. Frazier’s commitment to this perspective was evident in both his scholarly pursuits and his political worldview.

SEE ALSO Assimilation; Cox, Oliver C.; Drake, St. Clair; Park School, The; Sociology, Urban

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frazier, E. Franklin. 1932. The Negro Family in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frazier, E. Franklin. 1939. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frazier, E. Franklin. 1940. Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education.

Frazier, E. Franklin. 1947. Sociological Theory and Race Relations. American Sociological Review (June 12): 265–271.

Frazier, E. Franklin. 1957. Black Bourgeoisie. New York: The Free Press.

Frazier, Franklin E. 1957. Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1965. The Negro Family: A Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: Department of Labor.

Alford A. Young Jr.

Frazier, E. Franklin

WORKS BY FRAZIER

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

The most significant contributions of E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962) to the literature of sociology are embodied in his writings in the fields of family behavior and race and culture contacts. Although these fields are commonly demarcated as separate areas of study, they were not always so conceived by Frazier.

Frazier’s major contribution to the literature of the family is The Negro Family in the United States (1939). Building on earlier research (1932a;1932b), the book analyzes the impact first of slavery and then of emancipation and urbanization upon the Negro family. These experiences produced in the Negro family variations from the dominant American family pattern—to wit, a more important role for the female; attachment of great significance to variations in skin color; and a higher incidence of illegitimacy, of common law relationships, and of other forms of family disorganization. Frazier’s viewpoint that the structure and values of the Negro family in the United States are to be understood, except in the most isolated instances, as products of the Negro’s American experiences involved him in a lively controversy with the anthropological scholar and Africanist, Melville Herskovits, whose studies led him to the conclusion that the major institutions of Negro life, including the family, incorporate African survivals to a significant extent.

Frazier’s sociological conceptions were shaped mainly by his graduate training at the University of Chicago, from which he received the doctoral degree in 1931. There he studied with Ellsworth Paris, Robert E. Park, William F. Ogburn, and Ernest Burgess. He became associated with the program of research on the urban community and on race relations, directed by Park and conducted by a group of brilliant graduate students and young instructors that included Louis Wirth, Everett C. Hughes, and Herbert Blumer. Although critics labeled this group the “Chicago ecological school,” its basic conception of sociology was in fact much broader than the study of ecological phenomena. The group believed that any social phenomenon may be understood within the context of the larger social system and that the larger social system may be coterminous with society itself.

The influence of this approach is reflected in Frazier’s work on culture contacts (1949a_; 1957). In his Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957), he analyzed the ecological and demographic relationships that result from contacts between people of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds and the effects of these relationships on economic, political, and social organization.

Perhaps the most interesting result of Frazier’s work on culture contacts is his Black Bourgeoisie (1955), an analysis of the evolution, composition, and style of life of the Negro middle class in the United States. The Negro middle class, according to Frazler, differs from middle classes in general not only in composition but also in values. Frazier pointed out that the Negro middle class lacks the strong entrepreneurial tradition that has been the backbone of the middle classes in general. Negro business is small business, mainly of the service variety—restaurants, beauty parlors, food stores, undertaking establishments. Negro insurance companies and the Negro press may be exceptions, but even these are small compared to white organizations of the same type. Similarly, Negro banks are few and possess limited capital.

The black bourgeoisie, therefore, “is constituted of those Negroes who derive their principal income from services they render as white-collar workers.” This class of white-collar workers, mainly professionals and clerical and sales personnel, has acquired a dominant position among Negroes. Although their incomes are limited, they have lost much of the old virtues identified with the middle class—industry, thrift, belief in the substantive values of education—and have, instead, emphasized conspicuous consumption and attractive social life, values more commonly associated with a leisure class. This emphasis upon society and social life represents “status without substance.” This theme, that Negro values are distorted, recurs in many of Frazier’s articles on Negro life in the United States: he saw the racial system as forcing the Negro to live in isolation and as endowing him with a sense of dependency and inferiority.

Frazier was born in Baltimore, Maryland. An apt and intellectually curious student, he received a B.A. degree with honors from Howard University in 1916. His first serious, formal encounter with sociology was as a graduate student at Clark University, from which he received an M.A. degree in 1920. There he studied with Frank Hankins, whom he credited with opening up to him the possibilities of sociology as a systematic study. In addition to graduate study at Chicago, his formal education included a year of study at the New York School of Social Work, 1920-1921, and a year in Denmark as a fellow of the Scandinavian-American Foundation, 1921-1922. His major academic affiliation was with Howard University, where he was professor of sociology from 1934 until he died.

Frazier was president of the American Sociological Society in 1948 and was awarded honorary degrees by Morgan College, Baltimore, in 1955 and by the University of Edinburgh in 1960.

G. FRANKLIN EDWARDS

[For the historical context of Frazier’s work, see the biographies ofBURGESS; HANKINS; HERSKOVITS; OGBURN; PARK; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, seeRACE RELATIONS.]

WORKS BY FRAZIER

1932a The Negro Family in Chicago. Univ. of Chicago Press.

1932b The Free Negro Family: A Study of Family Origins Before the Civil War. Nashville, Term.: Flsk Univ. Press.

1939 The Negro Family in the United States. Univ. of Chicago Press. ⇒ A revised and abridged edition was published in 1948 by Dryden Press.

1949a Race Contacts and the Social Structure. American Sociological Review 14:1-11.

(1949b) 1963 The Negro in the United States. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan.

(1955) 1957 Black Bourgeoisie. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.

⇒ First published in French. A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier.

(1957) 1965 Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World. Boston: Beacon.

1964 The Negro Church in America. Liverpool University Studies in Sociology, No. 1. New York: Schocken; Liverpool (England) Univ. Press. ⇒ Published posthumously.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAVIS, A. P. 1962 E. Franklin Frazier 1894-1962: A Profile. Journal of Negro Education 31:429-435.

EDWARDS, G. FRANKLIN 1962 Edward Franklin Frazier: 1894-1962. American Sociological Review 27:890-892.

ODUM, HOWARD W. 1951 American Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States Through 1950. New York: Longmans. ⇒ See especially pages 233-239 on “Franklin Frazier: 1894—.”

Edward Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier (1894-1962), one of America's leading sociologists, specialized in studies of black people in North and South America and in Africa.

On Sept. 24, 1894, E. Franklin Frazier was born in Baltimore, Md. He took his bachelor of arts degree cum laude at Howard University in 1916. From 1916 to 1918 Frazier taught in secondary schools in Alabama, Virginia, and Maryland. In 1919 he began graduate studies at Clark University, Worcester, Mass., receiving a master of arts degree in sociology in 1920. As a research fellow at the New York School of Social Work (1920-1921), Frazier studied longshoremen in New York City. In 1921-1922 he studied folk high schools in Denmark. From 1922 to 1924 Frazier was an instructor in sociology at Morehouse College, serving also as director of the Atlanta School of Social Work (1922-1927). He married Marie E. Brown in 1922.

Frazier's essay "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" in Forum (June 1927) drew an analogy between race prejudice and insanity. As a result, Frazier had to leave Atlanta to avoid a white lynch mob. From 1927 to 1929 he pursued advanced study at the University of Chicago, receiving his doctorate in sociology in 1931 for The Negro Family in Chicago (1932). From 1929 to 1934 he worked under Charles S. Johnson, an outstanding African American sociologist, at Fisk University. Frazier returned to Howard University in 1934 as head of the department of sociology. In 1959 he became professor emeritus in the department of sociology and the African studies program.

From 1944 to 1951 Frazier served as part-time instructor at New York School of Social Work, Columbia University, and from 1957 to 1962 lectured at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Frazier also served as visiting professor at several other colleges and universities. In 1948 Frazier served as president of the American Sociological Society, and he was chief of the Division of the Applied Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, in 1951-1953. Frazier published 8 books, 18 chapters in books, and at least 89 articles. His most significant work was on the African American family. In The Negro Family in Chicago, The Free Negro Family (1932), and The Negro Family in the United States (1939) Frazier offered pioneering interpretations of the character, history, and influence of the black family. His concept of the black matriarchy, despite recent challenges and new approaches, dominates work on the black family.

Frazier also offered candid, often polemical, analyses of the role of the black middle class, as in Black Bourgeoisie (1957). The Negro in the United States (1949; rev. ed. 1957) and Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957; rev. ed. 1965) contain Frazier's analysis of the black experience throughout the world.

Frazier's death on May 17, 1962, prevented completion of his study of the black church. Only an outline of his views, The Negro Church in America (1961), was published. G. Franklin Edwards, a colleague and friend, described Frazier as "a tough-minded intellectual" and "a fine exponent of the best tradition in American sociology and scholarship."

Further Reading

The best introduction to Frazier is his own works. G. Franklin Edwards edited and wrote an excellent introduction to Frazier's On Race Relations: Selected Writings (1968). St. Clair Drake's introduction to the 1967 reprint edition of Frazier's Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940) is also of great value. Howard W. Odum, American Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States through 1950 (1951), contains a sketch of Frazier's life and works up to that date. There is a brief sketch of Frazier in Wilhelmena S. Robinson, Historical Negro Biographies (1968).

Additional Sources

Platt, Anthony M., E. Franklin Frazier reconsidered, New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c1991. □

Frazier, Edward Franklin (1894–1962) A member of the Chicago School of Sociology, former President of the American Sociological Society, and author of numerous studies of black family life in urban America, including The Negro Family in the United States (1939), The Negro in the United States (1949), and Black Bourgeoisie (1957). In the last of these, Frazier described the black business class in the USA as a ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’, which exaggerated its economic well-being to help create a world of make-believe into which its members could escape from their inferiority and inconsequence in American society. (The term ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’ had been used slightly earlier by C. Wright Mills in his White Collar (1951), to designate the multitude of white firms ‘with a high death rate, which do a fraction of the total business done in their lines and engage a considerably larger proportion of people than their quota of business’). Although sometimes accused of being empirically suspect, Frazier's work ranges far beyond its overt subject-matter of race relations, and makes a number of stimulating and still controversial points about the values and culture of modern Americans.