Frazier, E. Franklin

E. Franklin Frazier

The Baltimore-born E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962) entered the Harlem Renaissance through the pages of Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology (1925), contributing the essay “Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class,” a piece that forecast his later focus on the black bourgeoisie.  Opportunity magazine—a second prime venue for New Negro authors—awarded him an annual prize for another essay on the bases of social equality.  His cutting sociological writing was not appreciated by every American audience, however.  Frazier was forced to leave a teaching position at Morehouse College after his article “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” (1927) angered Atlanta whites with its claim that racism was akin to insanity.  He made hay from this dismissal by entering the world-leading Ph.D. program in sociology at the University of Chicago.  His doctoral dissertation on African American families in Chicago eventually grew into The Negro Family in the United States (1939), among the first comprehensive studies of its subject and the first written by a black sociologist.  Countering the accent on African retentions in the work of anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, Frazier here and elsewhere emphasized the American conditions and accommodations shaping African American culture.  His final and most famous book, Black Bourgeoisie (1957), first published in French two years earlier, censured the African American elite—Frazier’s own class fraction—for its conspicuous consumption.  J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI compiled a file of close to 400 pages on Frazier, sparked by a UNESCO employment investigation.

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Frazier Part 8