E. Franklin Frazier reconsidered

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE CALLS FOR A RECONSIDERATION of life, work, and contributions of E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962), Afro-American intellectual, sociologist, and activist. Why a reconsideration and what needs to be reconsidered? Some time in early 1920s, shortly after Frazier had moved to Atlanta to teach sociology at Morehouse College, he wrote a bitter essay about life on southern side of what he called Styxian Potomac, a region characterized by Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, Lawlessness, White Supremacy, Religious Intolerance, Peonage, and Anti-Evolutionism or Respectable Ignorance.... To Frazier, one of most terrifying aspects of institutionalized racism he found so deeply entrenched in South was monolithic, one dimensional reduction of Afro-American people to saints or stones.1 Neither lynching nor impoverishment nor job discrimination but rather the denial of personal? ity to Negro, he wrote in his first article for Du Bois' Crisis in 1924, was the greatest crime of age (Frazier, 1924: 213). It is ironic that since his death in 1962, Frazier has similarly been subjected to assessments which generally deny complexity and contradictions of his life's work. On one hand, his posthumous association with Moynihan Report (published three years after his death) stamped him with a pejorative image in progressive intellectual and political circles. Accepting at face value derisive nomination of Frazier as Father of Moynihan Report, several commentators then set out to trace this tendency back to Frazier's alleged cooptation by University of Chicago when he went there in late 1920s to complete a doctoral degree in sociology. According to this view, Chicago was site of Frazier's original sin which, despite his best efforts and good intentions, he was never able to expiate. By time of his death, prevail