Frazier, E. Franklin

Scholar-activist Edward Franklin Frazier was born on September 24, 1894, in Baltimore, Maryland, and died on May 17, 1962, in Washington, D.C. He was a political and intellectual force in the field of sociology and a pioneer in the area of urban sociology through his work on United States and African diasporic race relations. Frazier completed undergraduate studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C., received his master's degree at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then worked with, among others, Robert Park at the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in 1931. Most widely recognized for his works The Negro Family in America and Black Bourgeoisie, Frazier was a prolific social scientific scholar who published numerous essays and manuscripts, which led to his appointment as the first African American president of the American Sociological Association in 1948.

Frazier is typically associated with his studies at the University of Chicago or his tenure on the faculty at Howard University, but he had been an accomplished scholar and activist long before he set foot on the University of Chicago's Hyde Park Campus. Frazier was a socialist and feminist member of the collegiate arm of the New Negro Movement at Howard University. He later left his position as math teacher at Tuskegee in protest against the school's focus on trade education, self-published the anti–World War I pamphlet God and War, and, with his master's thesis at Clark University, contested two of the leading lights in scientific racism on Clark's campus, G. Stanley Hall and Frank Hankins. Frazier then studied in [Page 284]Denmark hoping to apply the Danish cooperative economic movement to black Southern communities, and he contributed to the 1925 Harlem Renaissance collection The New Negro. In Atlanta, Frazier taught sociology at Morehouse College and organized the Atlanta School of Social Work. In 1927, he was forced to leave Morehouse after publishing the controversial essay “The Pathology of Race,” in which he argued that white people had a Negro Complex that generated their abnormal behavior of racism, which bordered on insanity.

Frazier's studies at the University of Chicago led to the publication of his doctoral thesis, The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), and the landmark Negro Family in the United States (1939). In these works, Frazier was directly critical of Robert Park's inattention to the broader socioeconomic forces of slavery and persistent discrimination in theories of urban assimilation. At the same time, Frazier maintained the white cultural norms of industriousness, male-headed homes, and class distinctions within a capitalist social order as the standards through which to measure the so-called social disorganization of the black family in ways that were later appropriated by Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. However, as a faculty member at Howard University, Frazier became one of the “Young Turks” pushing to offer a forthright Marxist critique of capitalist race relations in the 1930s. Here Frazier would develop the ideas that became his most controversial and popular work, Black Bourgeoisie (1957), where he charged that a black middle class obsession with upward mobility created a make-believe world driven by conspicuous consumption that alienated the black middle class from both the black masses and progressive white liberals. Later Frazier would branch out to examine the centrality of race to the global economic system in Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957) and by serving with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from 1951 to 1953.

...