E. Franklin Frazier was a sociologist whose work on American African social structure provided insights into many of the problems affecting the black community. Frazier received his A.B. from Howard University (1916) and his A.M. in sociology from Clark University (1920). After being awarded a fellowship to the New York School of Social Work (1920–21), he accepted an American-Scandinavian Foundation grant to study folk high schools and the Cooperative Movement in Denmark (1921–22). He taught sociology at Morehouse College, a historically black institution in Atlanta, Georgia, where he organized the Atlanta University School of Social Work, later becoming its director. With the controversy surrounding the publication (1927) of Frazier’s “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” in Forum, he was forced to leave Morehouse. He received a fellowship from the University of Chicago (1927), where he took his Ph.D. (1931), and publication of his thesis, The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), sustained the university’s interest in his work on the black family. Black Bourgeoisie (1957) was Frazier’s most celebrated and criticized work. 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.
enemies too.