Background

Edward Franklin Frazier was born on September 24, 1894, in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. He was one of five children of James H. Frazier, a bank messenger, and Mary (Clark) Frazier, a homemaker. Edward's paternal grandfather had been a slave who bought freedom for his family and whose father was self-taught, was also forced to take charge of his fate. When Edward was only ten years old, his father died and he was, along with his mother, and siblings forced to help support the family. Frazier sold newspapers in the mornings, attended school, and then delivered groceries.

Education

Edward Frazier studied at that time legally segregated public schools in Baltimore and graduated from the Colored High and Training School in Baltimore (in 1923 became Frederick Douglass High School) in 1912. Then he won a scholarship to Howard University and received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in 1916. Frazier went on to continue his studies at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts earning a Master of Arts in Sociology in 1920. The topic of his thesis was "New Currents of Thought Among the Colored People of America." It was during his time at Clark that Frazier first became acquainted with sociology.

After being awarded a Russell Sage Foundation fellowship (1920-1921) to the New York School of Social Work (Columbia University School of Social Work), Frazier accepted an American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant to study folk high schools and the Cooperative Movement in Denmark at the University of Copenhagen (1921-1922). Edward received a fellowship from the University of Chicago (1927), where he took his Doctor of Philosophy in 1931, and publication of his thesis, The Negro Family in Chicago (1932).

Career

Frazier began his teaching career at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but he soon found that he disagreed with the school's emphasis on teaching vocational skills to the detriment of more scholarly subjects. After a short stint in the United States Army during which he worked as a business secretary for the Young Men's Christian Association, Frazier decided to pursue an advanced degree.

Frazier began his career teaching mathematics at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from 1916 to 1917, but he soon found that he disagreed with the school's emphasis on teaching vocational skills to the detriment of more scholarly subjects. He also taught English and History at St. Paul's Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia (1917-1918), and French and Mathematics at Baltimore High School, Maryland (1918-1919). During this time he published an anti-war pamphlet entitled God and War. After a short stint in the United States Army during which Edward worked as a business secretary for the Young Men's Christian Association, Frazier decided to pursue an advanced degree (Master's degree at Clark University).

Upon his return to the United States from Denmark Frazier was an instructor of sociology at Morehouse College (1922-1924) and accepted a position at Atlanta University as the director of the Atlanta School of Social Work (1922-1927). During his tenure at these institutions, he upgraded the School of Social Work into a professional program, began classwork for a doctorate at the University of Chicago, and wrote prolifically. He published a number of articles in periodicals and the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, where Frazier attempted to raise the consciousness of black readers. He stressed that history and society had shaped the roles of African Americans rather than biology and noted that many African Americans were members of the middle class. When he later likened racism to mental illness in an article titled "The Pathology of Race Prejudice," it stirred such strong reactions among residents in Atlanta, that he was fired from his position at Atlanta University.

With the threat of violence overshadowing the Fraziers, Edward and his wife moved to Chicago, where he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant and worked part-time as the research director of the Chicago National Urban League while he worked toward his degree. A grant from the Social Science Research Council allowed him to conduct a three-year study of the "Negro Family in Chicago," and in 1931 Frazier earned his doctorate. For around five years he taught with Charles S. Johnson, an outstanding African American sociologist at Fisk University (1929-1934), before moving to Howard University in 1934, where he developed the Department of Sociology into a solid program of scholarship and worked until his death in 1962.

In 1941 Frazier embarked on a year-long study of family life in Brazil, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. He spent the next twenty years associated with Howard University where his work focused on the environment of black colleges, especially that of Howard University, where became the head of the sociology department and remained until 1959. In 1959 Edward Frazier became Professor Emeritus in the department of sociology and the African studies program.

From 1944 to 1951 Frazier served as a part-time instructor at New York School of Social Work, Columbia University, and from 1957 to 1962 lectured at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Frazier also served as a visiting professor at several other colleges and universities. Edward Frazier was a founding member of the District of Columbia Sociological Society, serving as its President from 1943 to 1944. Edward also served as President of the Eastern Sociological Society (1944-1945). In 1948, Frazier was the first black elected as President of the American Sociological Society (later renamed American Sociological Association). His Presidential Address "Race Contacts and the Social Structure," was presented at the organization's annual meeting in Chicago in December 1948. He served as director of the Division of Applied Social Sciences UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) from 1951 to 1953, where he worked on the Tension and Social Change Project.

Frazier published 8 books, 18 chapters in books, and more than 90 articles. His most significant work was on the African American family. In The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), The Free Negro Family (1932), and The Negro Family in the United States (1939) Frazier offered pioneering interpretations of the character, history, and influence of the black family. His concept of the black matriarchy, despite recent challenges and new approaches, dominates work on the black family. Frazier also offered candid, often polemical, analyses of the role of the black middle class, as in Black Bourgeoisie (1957). The Negro in the United States (1949) and Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957) contain Frazier's analysis of the black experience throughout the world. Edward Frazier's in 1962, prevented completion of his study of the black church. Only an outline of his views, The Negro Church in America (1961), was published. Edward Franklin Frazier suffered from terminal cancer. He died of a heart attack on May 17, 1962.

Achievements

• His 1932 book The Negro Family in the United States (1939) was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.
  
  In 1948 Frazier was elected as the first black president of the American Sociological Association. He published a dozen books in his lifetime, including The Black Bourgeosie, a critique of the black middle class in which he questioned the effectiveness of African-American businesses to produce racial equality as well as numerous articles on African-American culture and race relations. In 1950 Frazier helped draft the UNESCO statement The Race Question and launched the Tension and Social Change Project.
  
  In addition, through his many years of college teaching, Frazier influenced hundreds of students and was named Professor Emeritus. Howard University named its Edward Franklin Frazier Center for Social Work Research after him in 2000. Edward Franklin Frazier has been listed as a noteworthy sociologist. by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Negro Church in America

    (Frazier's study of the black church and an essay by Linco...)

    1963
  • Black Bourgeoisie

    (A classic analysis of the Black middle class studies its ...)

    1957
  • Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World.

    (The problems inherent in contacts between advanced and ba...)

    1957
  • The Free Negro Family: A Study Of Family Origins Before The Civil War 1932
  • The Negro Family in Chicago 1932
  • The Negro Family in the United States 1939
  • Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States 1940
  • The Negro Family in Bahia, Brazil 1942
  • The Negro in the United States 1949
  • On Race Relations: Selected Writings 1968

Politics

Upholding socialism, Edward Frazier disdained many black elites and the members of the New Negro movement whom he believed were more concerned with success in white markets rather than the struggle of the black masses. Through his famous studies of the black family, race, and religious life, he sought to help formulate values that promoted a consciousness of cultural self-determinism that could guide blacks in their goal of assimilation while preserving the desirable elements of the past.

Because of his opposition to the religious and conservative views of Howard sociologist Kelly Miller, Frazier avoided taking sociology courses at Howard. He deplored Miller's religious eulogizing and his lack of scientific methodology. Outside the classroom, Frazier's deep interest in politics and race were stimulated by the left-wing ideas of the campus Intercollegiate Socialist Society and the pages of the socialist publication the Messenger.

After graduating with his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1931, Frazier began a five-year position at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At Fisk, he opposed the political outlook of the university's social science department director, Charles S. Johnson, one of the founders of the Harlem Renaissance and editor of the Urban League's Opportunity magazine. Though he despised Johnson's liberal politics and his associations with white philanthropists, he finished his tenure without publicly attacking his elder associate.

Drafted into the armed forces a few months later, he opposed joining an "imperialistic conflict" which ignored democratic rights for African Americans. Frazier's bitter opposition to the war prompted him to write his first major publication, "God and War." A 15-page pamphlet, "God and War" emerged as one of the first public anti-war statements written by African American intellectual. During the last decade of his life, Frazier dedicated himself to the world struggle of people of African descent. His last years were spent speaking out against African American intellectuals who he believed lacked the foresight and knowledge of their African counterparts. Frazier also faced pressures from the United States State Department which placed him under investigation for being affiliated with several subversive organizations.

Views

Edward Franklin Frazier is noted for his studies of the Black family and the Black middle class. Frazier's work on African American social structure provided insights into many of the problems affecting the black community.

Frazier's lifelong image as a "harsh critic" was revealed in a scholarly essay, in a 1929 issue of Forum magazine, entitled "The Pathology of Race Prejudice." This was his essay to examine white racism and its effects on its black victims. Its penetrating critique, however, led to his dismissal from the university but he continued his writing, focusing on the struggle of people of Africa and African descent to achieve equality, and on religion.

Frazier's research rested on the assumption that black Americans had a fundamental right "to full participation in American Democracy." Frazier's research also critiqued racist research which argued for biological determinism in explaining the low achievement of blacks. According to Frazier, blacks could not advance by romanticizing the crude rural culture exemplified in evangelical Christianity or the sorrow songs of spirituals and blues. Conversely, he believed nothing could be gained by imitating white bourgeoisie lifestyles and art. Though he never offered a coherent plan for formulating a modern African American culture to elevate blacks in the modern industrial society, Frazier did discern the complexity in the development of an integrated culture allowing blacks individual identity while seeking full participation within mainstream America. His first major work, The Negro Family in the United States (1939), examined how social-historical factors such as slavery, white terror, urban migration, and social disruptions affected the health of the African American family. He argued that African Americans were culturally American without any traces of their African past and thus launched an important intellectual debate with Melville J. Herskovits, a pioneer researcher in African retentions in black culture. Frazier continued this interpretation in subsequent works. Frazier was also a harsh critic of Jim Crow as the great inhibitor of the American Dream for the "American Negro," James Weldon Johnson, and Howard's sociologist Kelly Miller.

When Edward was in Atlanta, Georgia, he organized the Atlanta University School of Social Work, later becoming its director. Prior to the establishment of a separate School of Social Work at Howard, Frazier directed a social work program there for eight years. He also served as director of the Division of Applied Social Sciences UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) where he worked on the Tension and Social Change Project, assessing the interactions between people of different races and cultures and the effect of these interactions on each community. In all such research, Frazier insisted on an approach that examined economic, political, and attitudinal factors that shape the systems of social relationships.

Black Bourgeoisie (1957) was Edward's most celebrated and criticized work because he identified patterns of behavior among black Americans that were detrimental, such as conspicuous consumption and lack of willingness to pursue higher education. In this book, Frazier seared contemporary blacks who saw themselves as middle class. This false consciousness as he called it, led to a cultural elitism and material existence based solely on acquisitiveness. Edward Franklin Frazier has been ranked among the top African Americans for his influence of institutions and practices to accept the demands of African Americans for economic, political, and social equality in American life.

Quotations: "Education in the past has been too much inspiration and too little information. "

"America faces a new race that has awakened. "

"Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life. "

"The closer a Negro got to the ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist. "

Membership

• 

  In 1948 Edward Franklin Frazier became the first black president of the American Sociological Association.

  American Sociological Association , United States

• 

  Edward Frazier was a founding member and a president (1943-1944) of the District of Columbia Sociological Society.

  District of Columbia Sociological Society , United States

• 

  Edward Frazier was a President of the Eastern Sociological Society from 1944 to 1945.

  Eastern Sociological Society , United States

• 

  Edward Franklin Frazier was a vice president of the African Studies Association.

  African Studies Association , United States

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Frazier is a tough-minded intellectual and a fine exponent of the best tradition in American sociology and scholarship." - G. Franklin Edwards.

Connections

Edward Frazier married Marie E. Brown on September 14, 1922.

Father:

James H. Frazier

Mother:

Mary (Clark) Frazier

Wife:

Marie E. Brown

colleague:

Robert E. Park

colleague:

Michael R. Winston

colleague:

Rayford Whittingham Logan

colleague:

Anthony M. Platt

colleague:

Ernest Watson Burgess