Frazier, Edward Franklin

Impact on the world

Earned his sociology PhD from the University of Chicago in 1931, becoming the first African American to hold that degree from the institution, then published 'The Negro Family in the United States' in 1939, among the first major sociological studies of Black Americans researched and written by a Black scholar, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and argued that the instability some observers attributed to Black family structure stemmed from slavery's historical disruption of patriarchal family patterns and subsequent economic hardship, rather than any inherent racial or cultural flaw. In 1948 he became the first African American elected president of the American Sociological Society, and his 1957 book 'Black Bourgeoisie' offered a sharply critical analysis of the Black middle class that drew significant backlash from segments of the Black community he was accused of disparaging.

Life & background

Born in Baltimore in 1894 to a bank messenger father and a homemaker mother who both emphasized education as a path to freedom and a tool for social justice, Frazier graduated cum laude from Howard University in 1916 on a high school scholarship, then taught mathematics, English, history, and French at Tuskegee Institute, a Virginia normal school, and a Baltimore high school before earning his master's degree in sociology from Clark University in 1920. After studying the Danish folk high school and cooperative movements on a Scandinavian foundation grant, he returned to teach sociology at Morehouse College and helped establish the Atlanta University School of Social Work, but left his position there in 1927 after the public controversy surrounding his Forum magazine essay 'The Pathology of Race Prejudice,' which had analyzed white Southern racism in explicitly clinical, psychological terms few publications of the era were willing to publish from a Black author. He completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1931, his dissertation forming the basis of 'The Negro Family in the United States,' before giving up a faculty position at Fisk University in 1934 to chair Howard University's sociology department, a post he held for 25 years while engaging in a prominent intellectual debate with anthropologist Melville Herskovits over the degree to which African cultural retentions, versus the disruptive impact of slavery and economic conditions, shaped Black American family and community life. His 1957 'Black Bourgeoisie,' first published in French two years earlier, offered an unsparing critique of middle-class Black Americans he accused of pursuing conspicuous consumption and a hollow, conformist respectability rather than substantive engagement with the broader Black community's needs, a thesis that drew sustained criticism from Black readers and scholars who felt it unfairly disparaged the very class of educated, professional Black Americans Frazier himself belonged to. He went on to direct UNESCO's Division of Applied Social Sciences from 1951 to 1953, helped draft the landmark 1950 UNESCO statement formally rejecting scientific racism, authored a dozen books and over 100 articles across his career, and died in Washington, D.C. in 1962; Howard University's School of Social Work later established a research center in his honor.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; African American Registry; American Sociological Association; Social Welfare History Project; Britannica Kids