Frazier, E. Franklin (1894–1962)

Overview of Career

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in September 1894 at the beginning of the “Age of Segregation,” Frazier received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1931 and was the first person of discernible African American ancestry to do so. Nevertheless, Frazier spent the vast majority of his academic career in predominantly African American institutions of higher learning. Frazier had a brief tenure as a professor of sociology at Fisk University (1931–1934) and then went on to head the Department of Sociology at Howard University between 1934 and his death in 1962.

In 1948, Frazier became the thirty-eighth president of the American Sociological Society (now the American Sociological Association), marking the first time that a person of traceable African American descent was chosen as the head of a national professional association in the United States.

From 1951 through 1953, Frazier served as chief of the Division of Applied Sciences of the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He and an international team of scholars helped to formulate the organization's statement declaring that race was a “myth” and promulgating the “ethic of universal brotherhood.”

A specialist on the African American family and race relations, Frazier was the author of eight books, several of which were critically acclaimed, and more than 100 book chapters and journal articles. His reputation rests primarily on his contributions to the study of the African American family, especially his classical work, The Negro Family in the United States, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1939.

The African American Family

By documenting the harsh and brutal conditions under which many African Americans lived, Frazier in essence discredited the pervasive myth among White Americans that African Americans were by nature morally inferior and replaced it with a historical and socioeconomic analysis that stressed the oppressiveness of those same conditions under which most African Americans lived. In his writings on the African American family, Frazier employed the liberal environmentalist argument not only to account for the deviation of many families from the normative type of behavior but also to account for the conformity of a small number of Black families. He called attention to three experiences—slavery, emancipation, and urbanization—that had a major impact on Black family behavior.

By focusing on the experiences of Blacks in the United States, Frazier made a significant departure from older studies of the African American family. Authors of those older works had insisted that racial [Page 513]and/or cultural traits of the Black family had been acquired in Africa. Frazier, after surveying contemporary anthropological examinations of sexual behavior among so-called “primitive” peoples by Bronslaw Malinowski (in 1927) and Robert Briffault (in 1927) and an older study by Mary H. Kingsley (in 1897), found no scientific basis for the idea that the sexual behavior of such people was not subject to social control through customs and tradition. The argument that what were seen as the deviant sexual morals of Blacks were a product of their African heritage also rested on the assumption that African customs and traditions were brought by the slaves to the United States and were perpetuated over time. However, Frazier insisted that because varied and diverse African tribes were mixed together and their cultures were assimilated, most of them had lost their memories of Africa.

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