E. Franklin Frazier and Black Bourgeoisie

James E. Teele

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780826263490
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

When E. Franklin Frazier was elected the first black president of the American Sociological Association in 1948, he was established as the leading American scholar on the black family and was also recognized as a leading theorist on the dynamics of social change and race relations. By 1948 his lengthy list of publications included over fifty articles and four major books, including the acclaimed Negro Family in the United States. Frazier was known for his thorough scholarship and his mastery of skills in both history and sociology.

With the publication of Bourgeoisie Noire in 1955 (translated in 1957 as Black Bourgeoisie ), Frazier apparently set out on a different track, one in which he employed his skills in a critical analysis of the black middle class. The book met with mixed reviews and harsh criticism from the black middle and professional class. Yet Frazier stood solidly by his argument that the black middle class was marked by conspicuous consumption, wish fulfillment, and a world of make-believe. While Frazier published four additional books after 1948, Black Bourgeoisie remained by far his most controversial.

Given his status in American sociology, there has been surprisingly little study of Frazier's work. In E. Franklin Frazier and Black Bourgeoisie, a group of distinguished scholars remedies that lack, focusing on his often-scorned Black Bourgeoisie.

This in-depth look at Frazier's controversial publication is relevant to the growing concerns about racism, problems in our cities, the limitations of affirmative action, and the promise of self-help.

Part I

Recollections

E. Franklin Frazier

A Memoir

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

I first met E. Franklin Frazier at Fisk University in 1931, where I was enrolled in a core course, contemporary civilizations, in which he gave three or four lectures. We freshmen regarded him as a terror, and there were rumors of great rows among the three quite distinguished sociologists on the faculty, Bertram W. Doyle, E. Franklin Frazier, and Charles S. Johnson. We were not certain what the disputes were about or if, indeed, they existed, but they made wonderful gossip, and that was enough for neophytes. Every freshman had his or her favorite sociologist. Some favored Johnson, perhaps because of his quiet dignity and because he was able to dispense considerable funds from the research grants that he always seemed to have. Others favored Doyle because of his quiet folksiness, deep religiosity, and scholarly attainments. Still, there were those who preferred Frazier because of his earthy brusqueness and his indisputable national reputation as a distinguished and productive scholar. All three of them published important books during our undergraduate years. Impressive!

I had almost nothing to say to Frank Frazier until the spring of 1934 as I was ending my junior year at Fisk with a declared major in history. Standing just outside the entrance to the university post office, where both faculty and students inquired about their mail, my classmate asked about my plans for the final summer before graduation. I replied that I did not know if I should take the job offered by Charles Johnson to work with the team he was putting together to study Negro cotton farmers in the South or to go home to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and take my chance for a job there, where I could be with my family. Before my classmate could respond, Frazier joined the conversation and rendered his opinion that it was so typical of undergraduates to be “unable to make up their minds about anything!” I was shocked and embarrassed. On the spot, I declared that I would take the job to work with southern black tenant farmers. It was a memorable summer, and I silently credited Frazier for it. I had no chance to tell him about the summer of 1934, if I had dared, for by the time I returned from my summer job, Frazier had left Fisk to become the chair of the department of sociology at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

I saw little of Frazier until some thirteen years later, when I joined the department of history at Howard University. There had been a few chance encounters in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was teaching at St. Augustine’s College and where Marie Frazier’s sister, Julia Delany, wife of a distinguished Raleigh surgeon, also taught. At Howard University, Frazier and I were truly colleagues, holding the same rank of full professor. I was considerably younger, but he genuinely treated me as a colleague in every way, and our frequent association developed into a warm friendship.

One day Frazier asked me if I played poker, and when I replied in the negative, he invited me to join a group of like-minded men on the Howard faculty. The one prerequisite for membership in what was known among its members as the “Thinkers and Drinkers” was that a member did not and would not play poker. The only thing we did was meet, have drinks and dinner, and talk, talk, talk. Frazier was the senior member, joined by two of his colleagues in sociology, Harry Walker and G. Franklin Edwards, and anthropologist Mark Hanna Watkins. There was also a poet, Sterling Brown, a political scientist, Sam Dorsey, an historian, Harold Lewis, and myself.

We met in our respective homes or at our favorite restaurant, Harrisons, on Florida Avenue. None of the members’ wives played poker, except Marie Frazier, and I have no doubt that Frazier’s antipathy for the game and Marie’s devotion to it had something to do with his insisting that no poker player should belong to the “Thinkers and Drinkers.” During our meetings, there were no-holds-barred discussions of a variety of social and intellectual topics, but we would invariably end up in a discussion of Howard University and its need to improve its intellectual and educational health. At the end of the meetings, usually held once a month, we felt as though we had solved all or at least most of the problems the various members had introduced.

Frazier derived a certain degree of satisfaction, even pleasure, from the confusion among a few students over Frazier the sociologist and Franklin the historian. Some students were so bewildered that they called us by a garbled name: John Hope Franklin Frazier. One day, I approached Frazier, who had been cornered by a student who insisted that he was John Hope Franklin Frazier. I joined them at Franklin’s invitation and was asked to tell the young lady who I was. When I complied, the young lady looked more perplexed than ever as she looked at me, then at him, and then again at me. Suddenly, she seemed to realize, for the first time, that we were two distinctly different people: John Hope Franklin and E. Franklin Frazier.

When Frazier’s The Negro in the United States was published in 1949, it was a landmark treatise on African Americans from a sociologist’s point of view. He approached many problems historically, as was altogether fitting. How else would one approach the changes in, say, the family, housing, or urbanization? Certainly, examining these social systems in the context of change over time was the correct approach. Nevertheless, the work’s publication presented me with an excellent opportunity to accuse Frazier of attempting to join the respectable ranks of historians, thus “elevating himself to a new, honorable, and enviable” level of scholarship and esteem. It was after I could no longer conceal my mischief that my friend seemed relieved that I had not gone off the “deep end.” After my obviously false and mischievous claims, we agreed that we were, indeed, rivals as historians if not as sociologists.

By the time I had been at Howard for at least five years, Frazier and I were very close friends. Our wives, from the same section of North Carolina, were more than cordial. Even so, my wife, Aurelia, and I were unprepared for their invitation to us to occupy their home for two years while they were in Paris, where Frazier would head the social sciences division of UNESCO. We had been renting an apartment in the far northeast section of the city. When he further specified that our only obligations would be to pay the utility bills and take their mail to his Howard office for forwarding to Paris, we were overwhelmed by this display of thoughtful generosity. Now, not only could I walk to my office from Frazier’s nearby Rhode Island Avenue home, but we could save for a down payment on a home, further facilitated by Aurelia’s earning of a master’s degree in library science at Catholic University and becoming the librarian at Spingarn High School.

Upon the Fraziers’ return from Paris, they greeted us warmly and congratulated us on the birth of our son, who had arrived at the end of our first year in the Frazier home. The only remark made by childless Frazier, who loved children with a passion, was that it was obvious that the huge library he had left in my care was not sufficiently large or challenging enough to take up all of my time. To that remark, I had no rejoinder!

The final comment that Frank Frazier made to me was in 1956, when I accepted the position of chairman and professor in the department of history at Brooklyn College. Above all the din and excitement surrounding the appointment, Frazier called me aside and congratulated me. He went on to say that he was proud of me and delighted that this opportunity had come. Then, this giant of a man, who had reached the pinnacle of his profession and had been president of the American Sociological Society, told me that he would do the same thing if the opportunity arose, but that he was too old. He added prophetically that this would be only the beginning of the move of black scholars to institutions that would “view them not for their color but for what they had to offer.” Somehow, I felt better just knowing that in my bidding farewell to Howard University I departed with the blessing of Edward Franklin Frazier.

A Focused Memoir

Howard University and Frazier, 1933–1941

HYLAN A. LEWIS

In this essay I will discuss Howard University just before Frazier’s arrival in the 1930s, Frazier’s introduction to Washington, D.C., and Howard University and the part I played in his orientation, aspects of his reconstruction of the department of sociology, and the importance of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Also of significance is Frazier’s standing as an intellectual activist in association with many distinguished colleagues and fellow intellectuals, activists both at Howard and outside the school, in the 1930s and early 1940s. His contemporaries at Howard included Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Abram Harris, Edward Lewis, Ernest Just, William Hastie, and James Nabrit.

This cadre of black intellectuals was a significant precursor to today’s network of high-profile, public intellectuals, who operate out of somewhat different academic settings, and I’ll examine how it functioned and what roles Frazier and other intellectual activists played in it.

The Howard University of this period, marked by the Great Depression and preparation for World War II, used an informal structure. The informal rankings of faculty members in the college of liberal arts and other departments were based largely on conventional formal rankings: professor, associate professor, assistant professor, instructor, and assistant. The informal rankings of administrators was another matter; faculty members tended to present invidious distinctions concerning trappings and prerequisites of administrators’ prestige and power.

The informal faculty pyramid comprised three categories: faculty “stars,” senior faculty, and junior faculty. Faculty contemporaries were grouped into two relatively rigid, ranked categories: junior instructors and assistants, most of whom lacked Ph.D.s and tenure, and thus were deferential and expressed insecurities and anxieties in many ways; and professors in senior ranks with tenure and sometimes star status. Members of the latter group were accordingly respected, feared, envied, imitated, and sometimes even slyly mocked by junior faculty members, often with academic “gallows humor.”

Aspects of jealous mockery might be seen in some of the nicknames frequently used to categorize tenured, higher-salaried, senior faculty members. One telling label that some used was “plateau boy.” And an expression used to slyly designate faculty couples and families who presumably had it made was “they were so well off they ate turkey in the middle of the week.”

Frazier automatically belonged to the senior category, but he also came to the university as an academic star—that is, with a reputation based upon scholarly achievements, publications, and ongoing research. The reputation and status of some senior contemporaries were tellingly enhanced for junior faculty if their activities and achievements had included political activism and/or acting as mentors for more junior persons. Frazier had been a rebellious character in the early 1930s; it was said that whites had thrown him out of Atlanta because he was too radical. Therefore, he came to Howard with a reputation as an activist, adding to his star status.

Among Frazier’s junior colleagues were several faculty members who more or less straddled the divide between senior and junior colleagues. In this group were Emmett (Sam) Dorsey in political science, William Leo Hansberry in history, John W. Hughley in chemistry, James Porter in art, Frank Snowden in classics, and Doxey Wilkerson in education. With some notable exceptions, junior faculty members tended to exhibit more a rather passive congeniality than an active, overt competitiveness.

Factors that made for across-the-ranks collegiality in the mid-1930s were the organization and functioning of the local chapter of the American Federation of Labor, even though the number of faculty members involved was not large. The organization, changing leadership, and programs of this pioneering faculty union at Howard reflected a conjunction of forces. Initially, the precipitant for a resort to unionism was an acute conflict between a senior faculty member and the president of the university. This happened against a backdrop of long-term dissatisfaction, frustration, and even anger among some senior faculty—much of this directed at the president—and the changing climate of the times, which featured generally aggressive trade union expansion—eventually, if not initially, in part fueled by Marxian and “old left” ideology and politics.

The leadership and membership of the union local included senior professors and teaching assistants. This indicated some across-the-board faculty discontent. Senior professors were among the first leaders of the union. They were followed eventually by union leaders of lower rank who were clearly more to the left ideologically and politically.

Diverse membership in the social science division and in the local union increased interaction between senior and junior faculty; it also increased similarities in some attitudes and sentiments of senior and junior faculty. These similarities in view had to do with the administration, in general, and often with the university’s president, in particular. Verbalized dissatisfactions, especially among some senior faculty, affected faculty morale and the institutional climate. The major dissatisfactions seemed to be related to perceptions by many that there were serious gaps between the professions and claims of the university and its institutional performance and productivity. From the time of his arrival in 1935, Frazier played an important role in expressing legitimate faculty discontent.

My participation in the Howard faculty and in the distinctive world of junior colleagues began in the fall of 1933, two years before Frazier came to head and revitalize the department of sociology. Following three quarters of graduate study in the University of Chicago and a job teaching summer school at my alma mater, Virginia Union University, I had received a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. I joined Abram (Abe) Harris in the economics department as a research assistant in order to do the statistical work on what would later be published as The Negro as Capitalist. Interestingly, the fellowship award I received was one designated specifically for southerners. It had been established at the suggestion of Charles S. Johnson, also a graduate of Virginia Union University and one of my undergraduate idols. This award was a precursor of the affirmative action programs in higher education for minorities that would come approximately half a century later. The first three recipients of this award were Estelle Hill from Fisk University, Sarah Alice Mayfield from Birmingham Southern University, and me, all of whom enrolled in the graduate sociology program at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1932.

The period just before the arrival of Frazier was very significant for the nation, the university, and young academic persons such as myself, and was one of remarkable ferment. Major social, political, and economic changes marked the heady early days of the Roosevelt administration. The New Deal brought significant physical changes to the university: the destruction of the old main building, which had long loomed as the center of the campus, followed by a period of rather quick, dramatic construction. New buildings included the library, Douglass Hall, which housed the classrooms and office into which Frazier moved; the chemistry building, dedicated by President Roosevelt; and three new dormitories—Sojourner Truth, Crandall, and Baldwin—for students and faculty. This growth along with the advent of Mordecai Johnson as the first black president of Howard University made for an exhilarating period at the school. Moreover, Congress favored increased appropriations for Howard. These permitted the university to expand its departments, including liberal arts and, in particular, the professional schools. Behind all of this was support from people like Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Eleanor Roosevelt, and members of the Black Cabinet, as it came to be called; also important were behind-the-scenes efforts that included brokering efforts by Ralph Bunche in relationship to Howard University and the administration.¹ The university had reached a turning point.

Amidst all this activity, Frazier arrived. At first he lived, as did many faculty members in the early days, in one of the new dormitories because specific housing for the faculty was not available. So, he and his wife, Marie, lived in Sojourner Truth Hall, along with students and other members of the faculty and staff. Soon after the Fraziers’ arrival, arrangements were made for them to occupy a house on northwest Rhode Island Avenue, which was just turning from white occupancy to Negro occupancy. The Fraziers moved out o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Recollections
• Part II. Graduate Study
• Part III. Reflections on the Black Middle Class and the Black Community
• Conclusion and Some Research Questions
• About the Contributors
• Index
• About the Editor