E. Franklin Frazier

The justification of the present book by Professor Frazier is to be found in the novelty of his approach as well as in the altered position of the Negro in the United States and of the United States in the world scene. The epic of America offers the greatest example in the modern world of the building of a nation and a civilization out of the diverse peoples and cultures of the earth. The career of the Negro in America furnishes the most dramatic instance of the integration of one such element into our national life. The present book has traced this process with meticulous care. Professor Frazier has succeeded in depicting with clarity and understanding the adjustment of the Negro as a racial and cultural group to the life of the larger society and the responses that society has made to his presence. We see in these pages something more, however, than the analysis of a unique minority. This work, while drawing its concrete materials from the experiences of the Negro in the United States, reflects the processes and problems generally associated with the emergence, the life cycle, and the integration of minorities wherever they may be found. Although the Negro minority, because of the racial factor and because of the complicating historical factor of the institution of slavery, represents certain unique features, there are many phases of the Negro's life in America that throw light on the position of all other minorities in this country. Professor Frazier has adopted a broad sociological perspective and has found that by portraying the experiences of the Negro in the context of his own community and institutions and the more inclusive American community and its institutions, it is possible to reveal with greater realism and balance the actual life of the Negro and of America. - Introduction.

Experiences of Negro boys and girls living in Washington D. C. and Louisville, Kentucky.

When it was first published in 19577, E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie was simultaneously reviled and revered - revered for its skillful dissection of one of America's most complex communities, reviled for daring to cast a critical eye on a section of black society that had achieved the trappings of the white, bourgeois ideal. The author traces the evolution of this enigmatic class from the segregated South to the post-war boom in the integrated North, showing how, along the road to what seemed like prosperity and progress, middle-class blacks actually lost their roots to the traditional black world while never achieving acknowledgment from the white sector. The result, concluded Frazier, is an anomalous bourgeois class with no identity, built on self-sustaining myths of black business and society, silently undermined by a collective, debilitating inferiority complex. To read Black Bourgeooisie today is not only to experience one of the most important studies of African American life but also to realize how controversial and relevent Frazier's revelations and challenges remain. -- from back cover.

The Negro Family in the United States, was hailed as a highly important contribution to the intimate history of the people of the United States. It was the first comprehensive study of the family life of African Americans, beginning with colonial-era slavery, extending through the years of slavery and emancipation, to the impact of Jim Crow and migrations to both southern and northern cities in the twentieth century. Frazier discussed all the themes that have concerned subsequent students of the African American family, including matriarchy and patriarchy, the impact of slavery on family solidarity and personal identity, the impact of long-term poverty and lack of access to education, migration and rootlessness, and the relationship between family and community. Frazier insisted that the characteristics of the family were shaped not by race, but by social conditions.