E. Franklin Frazier

E. Franklin Frazier was an American sociologist who studied Black family life, race relations, and the African American middle class. His research connected these subjects to slavery, migration, and social change.

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W. E. B. Du Bois: An American sociologist, historian, and civil rights leader who studied racial inequality and helped found the NAACP. Du Bois’s work on Black communities and racial stratification formed a major intellectual context for Frazier.
Slavery in the United States: A system of hereditary racialized bondage that shaped American society from the colonial period through the Civil War. Frazier traced the disruption of African American family and kinship structures to slavery.
The Negro Family in the United States: E. Franklin Frazier’s 1939 study tracing African American family life from slavery through emancipation and migration. This landmark book presents his historical explanation of changing Black family structures.
Moynihan Report: A 1965 United States government report linking Black poverty to family structure and the legacy of slavery and discrimination. Its account of Black family patterns echoed themes associated with Frazier but drew different political criticism.
American Sociological Association: A professional organization founded in 1905 to advance sociology in the United States. Frazier became its first Black president in 1948, marking a milestone in the discipline.
Charles S. Johnson: An American sociologist who studied race relations and led Fisk University during the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson and Frazier were leading Black sociologists who built institutions and research on race.
Great Migration: The mass movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to other regions of the United States, especially from 1910 to 1970. Migration transformed Black family life and urban communities central to Frazier’s research.
Black Bourgeoisie: E. Franklin Frazier’s study of the African American middle class, first published in French in 1955 and in English in 1957. The book applies his critical analysis to the class position and social ideals of Black elites.
Melville J. Herskovits: An American anthropologist who argued that African cultural continuities persisted in African American life. Herskovits’s emphasis on African cultural retention differed from Frazier’s account of slavery’s cultural disruption.
Howard University: A historically Black university in Washington, D.C., founded in 1867. Frazier taught at Howard for much of his career and helped build its sociology department.