Frazier, Edward Franklin

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Frazier, Edward Franklin

September 24, 1894
May 17, 1962

Born in Baltimore in 1894, the year in which W. E. B. Du Bois was working on his doctoral degree at Harvard and 135 blacks were lynched in the South, essayist and activist E. Franklin Frazier was encouraged in his formative years by his parents, especially his working-class father, to seek upward mobility and social justice through education. With a scholarship from Colored High School he went on to Howard University, where he graduated cum laude in 1916 after four years of rigorous education and political activism at the "capstone of Negro education." For the rest of his academic career, he taught primarily in segregated, African-American schools and colleges, first in the South in the 1920s and early 1930s, then for most of his career in Howard's sociology department. Between teaching jobs he received scholarships that enabled him to get a master's degree at Clark University (1920) and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago (1931). Despite his election as the first African-American president of the American Sociological Association (1948) and his recognition by UNESCO in the 1950s as a leading international authority on race relations, Frazier was never offered a regular faculty appointment by a predominantly white university.

With minimal institutional and foundation support, Frazier managed to produce eight books and over one hundred articles. He is best known for his pioneering studies of African-American families, especially The Negro Family in the United States (1939/2001), which demonstrated that the internal problems of black families were socially created within and by Western civilization, not by the failure of Africans to live up to American standards. Building upon Du Bois's 1908 essay, "The Negro American Family," Frazier refuted the prevailing social scientific wisdom that, in his words, "most often dealt with the pathological side of [black] family life." In contrast, Frazier's family is a broad spectrum of households, constantly in a process of change and reorganization, sometimes disorganized and demoralized, sometimes tenacious and resourceful. To Frazier the serious problems within African-American families—"the waste of human life … delinquency, desertions, and broken homes"—was the result not of cultural backwardness but rather of economic exploitation and the social damage inflicted by racism.

Frazier also made a variety of other important intellectual contributions: as an ethnographer and historian of everyday life in black communities; as a trenchant and subtle critic of the dynamics and etiquette of racism; as an influential consultant to Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944); as the author of the first systematic textbook on The Negro in the United States (1949); and as a critic of overly specialized, narrowly conceived studies in the social sciences. Frazier's popular reputation was made by Black Bourgeoisie (first published in the United States in 1957), but he explored the controversial relationship between class, politics, and culture all his life, beginning with a polemical essay on "La Bourgeoisie Noire" in 1928 and ending with his scholarly assessment of Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957). In this body of work he challenged monolithic portraits of African-American communities and documented their socioeconomic diversity; in particular, he exposed the collaborative and opportunistic role played by the black middle class in holding back the struggle for social equality and ensuring that "bourgeois ideals are implanted in the Negro's mind." Instead of being "seduced by dreams of final assimilation," Frazier called upon black leaders to envision "a common humanity and a feeling of human solidarity" in which "racial and cultural differentiation without implications of superiority and inferiority will become the basic pattern of a world order."

Frazier was part of a cadre of activists, intellectuals, and artists who after World War I formed the cutting edge of the New Negro movement that irrevocably changed conceptions of race and the politics of race relations. Though a loner who distrusted organizations, Frazier had close and respectful relationships with civil rights leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and A. Philip Randolph, as well as with scholars such as Ralph Bunche and Abram Harris who tried to bridge the gap between university and community, theory and practice. From his undergraduate days at Howard, when he was a vigorous opponent of U.S. entry into World War I, until his last years, when he welcomed a revitalized civil rights movement, Frazier was a politicized intellectual who believed that "a moral life is a life of activity in society."

Bibliography

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

Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1949.

Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939; South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

Holloway, Jonathan Scott. Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Platt, Anthony M. E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

anthony m. platt (1996)
Updated bibliography

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History