E. Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier was born in Baltimore on the twenty-fourth of September 1894, the son of a bank messenger. He took his undergraduate degree at Howard University (1916), his master's at Clark University (1920), and his doctorate at the University of Chicago Sociology Department in 1931 — the first African American to earn a Chicago Sociology PhD.

He chaired the Department of Sociology at Howard University from 1934 to 1959 — twenty-five years — and built it into the premier Black-led sociology department in American higher education. Under his chairmanship, Howard Sociology trained successive generations of African and African American sociologists; the department's alumni populated nearly every Black-led social-science research program in the United States and across post-independence Africa.

His scholarly work concentrated on the structure and political condition of the African American family, urban Black migration, and the formation of a Black middle class. The Negro Family in the United States (1939) was the first comprehensive sociological study of African American family structure and remained the canonical Black sociological text on the subject for thirty years. Black Bourgeoisie (1957) — his sustained critique of the assimilationist political conservatism of the Black middle class — generated controversy and influence in equal measure, anticipating by a decade the political analysis of Stokely Carmichael (also placed in this archive) and others.

He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1948 — the first African American to lead the discipline's national professional organization. He served as Chief of the Division of Applied Social Sciences at UNESCO from 1951 to 1953.

He died in Washington, D.C., on the seventeenth of May 1962, age sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the sociologist who built the Black-led sociology department American higher education needed.