E. Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier, who published as E. Franklin Frazier, was an American sociologist, born in Baltimore in 1894, who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1931 and spent most of his career on the faculty of Howard University. His 1939 book The Negro Family in the United States examined the effects of slavery, migration and urbanization on Black American family structure and won the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, ranking among the first sociological studies of Black American life researched and written by a Black scholar. His later book Black Bourgeoisie (1957) offered a critical account of the Black American middle class. In 1948 he became the first Black sociologist elected president of the American Sociological Association. He died in 1962.