Edward Franklin Frazier (September 24, 1894 – May 17, 1962), was an American sociologist and author. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States in 1939. The dissertation analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The Negro Family in the United States was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. The Negro Family in the United States was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.
Edward Franklin Frazier was elected as the
first black president of the American Sociological Association in 1948. Frazier
wrote many books in his lifetime, including The Black Bourgeoisie, a critique of
the black middle class in which he questioned the effectiveness of
African-American businesses to produce racial equality.
He attended the
Baltimore public schools, which were legally segregated then. Edward Franklin
Frazier graduated in 1912 from the Colored High and Training School in Baltimore
(Frederick Douglass High School). He graduated with honors from Howard in 1916.
Frazier was a top scholar, pursuing Latin, Greek, German and mathematics.
Edward Franklin Frazier attended Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts, where he earned a master's degree in 1920. The topic of his
thesis was New Currents of Thought Among the Colored People of America. During
his time at Clark, Frazier first began to study sociology, combining his
approach with African-American history and culture. Edward Franklin Frazier
spent 1920–1921 as a Russell Sage Foundation fellow at the New York School of
Social Work (Columbia University).
In 1927 Edward Franklin Frazier
published his article titled "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" in Forum. Using
Freudian terms, he wrote that prejudice was "abnormal behavior," characteristic
of "insanity," including dissociation, delusional thinking, rationalization,
projection, and paranoia. Edward Franklin Frazier rightly argued, white people
were literally driven mad by the "Negro-complex," to the point that "men and
women who are otherwise kind and law-abiding will indulge in the most revolting
forms of cruelty towards black people."
Edward Franklin Frazier's stature
was recognized by his election in 1948 as the first black president of the
American Sociological Association. At Howard, Frazier was a prominent member of
the Howard School of International Affairs, where his scholarship and research
augmented Race and Empire in International Affairs.
Edward Franklin
Frazier adopted an approach that examined economic, political and attitudinal
factors that shape the systems of social relationships. He continually pressed
to find the "social reality" in any context he investigated. Frazier's position
emphasized African-American cultural developments as a process of accommodation
to new conditions in the Americas. Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie, the 1957 English
translation of a work first published in French in 1955, was a critical
examination of the adoption by middle-class African Americans of a subservient
conservatism.