E. Franklin Frazier is rightfully remembered as one of the most important and influential sociologists in the United States, and one of the nation's most prominent Black sociologists. Although Frazier deserves this fame, it tends to overshadow his lifelong radicalism and refusal to accept (in practice or theory) the naturalness of Black oppression in the United States. This radicalism infuses all of his writing, but is especially evident in his earlier writings when, rather than an academic, Frazier was best known as a radical “New Negro” voice. When Frazier died of cancer in 1962, the American Sociological Review ran an obituary by his Howard University colleague G. Franklin Edwards. This obituary notes Frazier published ninety-nine articles, but only mentions one by name, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” from 1927. That article's “satirical style,” Edwards notes, “bears a kinship to the technique employed by Frazier” in his famous Black Bourgeoisie. After noting “Frazier was forced by a white mob to leave Atlanta where he was then teaching” upon the publication of the article, Edwards underlines the two writings, “though published more than a quarter of a century apart, were tied together by more than a common style” because “in both of these works, Frazier demonstrated his determination to describe, analyze, and evaluate social reality as he perceived it, even when he was fully conscious that his evaluation would not be accepted by a great many readers.”1 Another Howard colleague, English professor Arthur Davis, in an obituary in the Journal of Negro Education, stressed how the two writings underlined Frazier's insistence on telling the truth about race relations in the United States: “Early in his career, [Frazier] was run out of Atlanta for an article he wrote on Southern whites; he was ‘lynched’ in the Negro press for his Black Bourgeoisie.”2Sociologist St. Clair Drake referred to “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” in his introduction to Frazier's The Negro Youth at the Crossways, published five years after Frazier's death: “Legend has proliferated about the circumstances of his retreat from Atlanta, with Frazier emerging from the telling as a sort of combative hero, fighting a rear-guard action against the Ku Klux Klan.”3 One study of Frazier in the late 1980s noted that “the 1927 article has become a legend in black history.”4 Ninety years after Frazier's article was published, a professor of African and African American Studies wrote about the article in an opinion column, “The Pathology of Delusion,” denouncing racist threats against Black scholars.5It is clear that as the hundred-year anniversary of Frazier's article approaches, it continues to resonate. At the same time, few scholars have examined Frazier's 1927 article or the circumstances surrounding its publication in depth. This lack of attention reflects the hybrid nature of the piece, as well as scholars’ neglect of Frazier's early writings, which have tended to be overshadowed by his later works such The Negro Family in the United States and The Black Bourgeoisie. Frazier's importance to American sociology justifies this attention to his later writings, but overemphasizing them contributes to diminishing Frazier's radicalism and militancy and overlooking how the radical ideals of his earlier writings continued to infuse his later publications. In the 1920s, before he earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago, Frazier had already developed a radical critique of Black oppression in the United States, reflecting and contributing to the reenergized “New Negro” trend in Black politics and culture in the 1920s. Although the term encompasses divergent thinkers from Black nationalists like Marcus Garvey to socialists like A. Philip Randolph, New Negro writers emphasized Black self-respect and rejected the idea that Black people were psychologically or psychiatrically damaged.6 “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” reiterates themes central to Frazier's radial vision.Rather than being the precipitous event that is often depicted, the article's publication reflected the culmination of years of tension between Frazier and the leadership of the Atlanta School of Social Work over the reality of racial segregation as well as themes that Frazier had been developing for several years. The present article examines the controversy around the publication of “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” and argues that the value of Frazier's article is not its psychological examination of sex and racism, but its satire of Jim Crow attitudes and parody of racist social scientific writing. Because the article was written before Frazier began studying at the University of Chicago, understanding the article and the context in which it was written illuminates Frazier's radical early writings and their importance for his later thought. Rather than being a one-off attempt at humor or an angry retort to his soon-to-be former colleagues at the Atlanta School of Social Work, the article embodies themes that were central to Frazier's writings before and after. The purpose of the 1927 article was not to argue that Southern Whites were insane, but to highlight that race relations in the United States were not natural or logical.Not all scholars have oversimplified “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” or ignored its connection to Frazier's other writings. Anthony M. Platt's E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered notes that of Frazier's writings of the time, this “was the most controversial and evoked the most discussion and debate.”7 Erin D. Chapman's Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture provides an incisive analysis of the article. After connecting Frazier's article to the tradition of Ida B. Well's anti-lynching classic Southern Horrors, Chapman situates the article in the context of Black politics of the 1920s, describing it as a “particularly explicit and unequivocal expression of New Negro progressivism.” Chapman stresses the gender aspects of the article, asserting that “Frazier's emphasis on manhood and defense of black men's patriarchal prerogatives and domains, including black women's bodies, were also emblematic of New Negro imperatives.” Unlike more cursory treatments, Platt and Chapman have contextualized Frazier's article, including its earlier origins. Although Platt and Chapman recognize the satirical nature of Frazier's article, neither provides a deeper analysis of the article, which is understandable because they deal with the article in the context of broader projects.8 The current article attempts to provide such a deeper analysis. Examining “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” helps better frame Frazier's radicalism, locating the roots of themes that he developed in his mature writings in his writings from the 1920s. It also anchors the radicalism of these earlier writings in a broader Black radical tradition.Frazier's article asserted that “the behavior motivated by race prejudice shows precisely the same characteristics as that ascribed to insanity.” Frazier labeled this “the Negro-complex,” which, he argued, was not innate, but “an acquired psychological reaction.” He observed how “the Negro-complex obtrudes itself on all planes of thought,” for example, when Whites oppose health programs, the selective draft, or woman suffrage, because these would benefit Blacks. Racists cannot be disabused of their racism through appeal to facts, because “just as the lunatic seizes upon every fact to support his delusional system, the white man seizes myths and unfounded rumors to support his delusion about the Negro.” Instead of treating racism as natural part of human existence, Frazier declared “certain manifestations of race prejudice” are “abnormal behavior.”9The most controversial aspect of the piece is Frazier's emphasis on interracial sex. “When,” Frazier wrote, “two systems of incompatible ideas cannot be kept from conflict, the insane man reconciles them through the process of rationalization. Through this same process of rationalization the Southern White man creates defenses for his immoral acts, and lynching becomes a holy defense of womanhood.” Frazier asserted, “The energetic measures which Southerners use to prevent legal unions of white with colored people look suspiciously like compensatory reactions for their own frustrated desires for such unions.” He added: Where the conflict between the personality as a whole and the unacceptable complex is not resolved within the mind of the subject, the extremely repugnant system of dissociated ideas is projected upon some real or imaginary individual. Except in the case of those who, as we have seen, charge the Negro with an inherent impulse to rape as an unconscious defense of their own murderous impulses, the persistence,—in the face of contrary evidence,—of the delusion that the Negro is a ravisher can only be taken as a projection. According to this view, the Southern white man, who has,—arbitrarily without censure,—enjoyed the right to use colored women, projects this insistent desire upon the Negro when it is no longer socially approved, and his conscious personality likewise rejects it.10Frazier then turned to sexual relations between White women and Black men: “Hallucinations often represent unacceptable sexual desires which are projected when they can no longer be repressed. In the South a desire on the part of a white woman for a Negro that could no longer be repressed would most likely be projected,—especially when such a desire is supposed to be as horrible as incest. It is not unlikely, therefore, that imaginary attacks by Negroes are often projected wishes.”11 In other words, Frazier wrote, White Southerners’ racism resulted from repressed sexual attraction towards Black people that was projected onto Black people themselves. The argument that White women are in a constant state of lust for Black men inverts the standard racist argument that all Black men are in a constant state of lust for White women. This inversion highlights the importance (and hypocrisy) of the sexual blood line that underscores Black oppression in the United States. Frazier's point is the absurdity of race relations in the United States. It is the entire system of race relations that is pathological and the broader social insanity is that most people (not just “the population of the asylum”) accept this as natural. The piece's radicalism, then, is not Frazier's provocative argument about sex, but how he uses these to expose the pretensions of scientific reality of race relations.Newspapers as far as Canada and California excerpted Frazier's article, but the strongest reaction was closer to home.12 On June 10, veteran White Southern journalist Sam W. Small highlighted the article in his column in the Atlanta Constitution. Small began by asserting “the inescapable fact” of the inevitability of racism: “Not before the world is consumed by fervent heat . . . will there be understanding and accord between the white and negro races of America.” Small (whose dialect sketches in the Constitution in the 1870s have been credited with being the prototype for the Uncle Remus character) left clear his own views, describing himself as a man “born here in the south on premises swarming with negro slaves, who grew up in daily contact with them, saw them emancipated, has lived here in Atlanta for more than 66 years . . . and whose only prejudice against the negro is that I prefer not to eat and sleep with him.” After quoting The Forum's description of Frazier, including his full name and job title, Small quoted several paragraphs from Frazier's article, dismissing it as “unimportant, because as circumstantial as it is unscientific.” Small added: “But there is one argument in it that is revolting for its suggestions.” He continued: “This suggestion that the primarily guilty party in case of sexual outrage by negroes upon white women is the white woman herself through the intangible incitement of her own desire, is the vilest that this writer has ever encountered in his lifetime. The author of it is evidently more insane by reason of his anti-white complex than any southerner obsessed by his anti-negro complex.”13Two weeks later, the Baltimore Afro-America ran an article under the front-page headline, “School Head Flees Dixie Lynchers.” The paper from Frazier's hometown wrote, “Following the appearance of the article on the news stands, local newspapers published references to it and whites over the telephone threatened Mr. Frazier with a lynching. Friends hurried him out of town.” According to the paper, the Fraziers escaped to Baltimore, then moved to Chicago.The article asserted, “Frazier has been forced out of the principalship of the Atlanta School of Social Service after five years’ service” because “trustees of the school felt that his ideas on race equality were too far advanced for the South.”14 A month later the paper reprinted a statement from the Board of Trustees of the Atlanta School of Social Work that clarified that the Board decided to replace Frazier in January, but Frazier refused to resign. “If the Atlanta School of Social Work had been disposed to remove Mr. Frazier because of any of his magazine articles or his personal views,” the statement read, “it could have done so long ago. . . . As a matter of fact, Mr. Frazier was asked to resign because he did not prove as effective an executive and administrator as was needed.”15 Filled with bureaucratic jargon, the statement, buried on an inside page, did little to dampen the legend of Frazier's escape from Atlanta.In late August, Sam Small's column in the Constitution again turned to Frazier's article. Small denounced the article as “strongly offensive to southern readers.” Small claimed “race prejudice” against Black people in the South was natural and inevitable, adding: “The psychogenesis of it is instinctive race repulsion and the function of it is the inhibition of inter-racial social equality.” Small described Reconstruction, the period of interracial democracy after the Civil War, as the root of current Southern race problems and “since then ‘white supremacy’ has become with us as cardinal principle as any in science or religion.” Small took aim at Frazier's central argument: “The lynching in the south of more negroes than whites is proffered as proof as race prejudice having a psychosis of insanity. That theory is ridiculous. A lynching that would be an act of insanity would be a guiltless act; but a lynching is never anywhere an act of insanity.” Recalling the “five mob lynchings in the south” he had covered as a journalist—two of White victims and three of Black victims—Small wrote: “In each case, the mob pulsed with a common feeling of intolerable outrage and acted with the common purpose to execute an earned penalty without awaiting the leaden-footed operation of the community's legal machinery. Lynching anywhere in our country is criminal and indefensible. That more lynchings occur in the south than other regions is true. The fact is obviously explicable. In the south more negroes commit crimes that incite mobs and the negroes that are lynched are executed because of their crimes, and not because of their color.” Small emphasized the presence of “race prejudice in the make-up of the negro” and “antipathy to the white race.”16 He cited the original Afro-American story that Frazier had been fired for the article, as if to take credit for this.“The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” was not the reason Frazier left the Atlanta School of Social Work; he had written the article years earlier and had already resigned his position at the school to study at the University of Chicago when it was finally published. Instead, the article was the culmination of several years of conflict between Frazier and the Board. The Atlanta School did not fire Frazier because of “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” but the article encapsulated the differences between Frazier's radicalism and the Board of Trustees’ conservatism. Furthermore, the article, and the image of it causing Frazier to lose his job and having to flee Atlanta one step ahead of the Klan, solidified Frazier's reputation as a defiant opponent of Jim Crow, a “race man” who asserted his manhood in the face of Klan terror. The press coverage of Frazier's article made Frazier infamous. Fellow sociologist Charles Johnson wrote to Frazier, “everywhere I went [in Atlanta] the colored populace was asking, ‘Have you read Frazier's farewell to the South.’”17Today Frazier is remembered as a leading sociologist of Black America, but in the 1920s he was beginning his academic career. Frazier graduated from Howard University in 1916 and taught mathematics for a year at Tuskegee, then taught briefly in Maryland and Virginia before earning a master's degree in sociology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1920. Over the next several years, Frazier had fellowships at the New York School of Social Work and the University of Copenhagen. In 1922 Frazier moved to Atlanta, first to teach sociology at Morehouse College and then to become director of the Atlanta School of Social Work. In 1927—shortly after his article on “Racial Pathology” was published—Frazier left social work and enrolled in doctoral studies at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Robert Park.18The importance of Frazier's radicalism tends to be overshadowed by his later academic success. Frazier's radicalism is evident in his master's thesis, “New Currents of Thought among the Colored People of America,” which examines what would later be termed the “New Negro” movement and which Frazier refers to the “new school” of Black thought. This begins with a survey of Black thought from the end of the Civil War through the early twentieth century. Then Frazier, focusing primarily on A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen's The Messenger, describes how, “within the last few years a new school of radical thought has sprung up among Negroes.” Calling this trend “the most fundamental and thorough movement ever initiated among Negroes,” Frazier contrasts it to the radicalism of Frederick Douglass that was based on “abstract principles of rights” and the later radicalism of W. E. B. Du Bois, which “relied on the conscience of the American people and the courts.” He argues that “this new school begins its career by a scientific analysis of the problem and relying on the force of the Negro as an economic factor, and ignoring abstract principles, concludes that only force, economic and otherwise, can secure recognition for the Negro.”19 This radical perspective infuses “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” with its attempt to undercut the scientific justification of race prejudice and the determination to reject this.One of the issues that Frazier examines is “social equality,” which he describes as “the rallying cry of the South whenever she wants defense or justification for denying the Negro even his primary rights. No one seems to know what it means; for it may be the right to invite a colored person to dinner or it may be expanded to include the right to vote.” Frazier quotes from The Messenger's defense of “‘Social Equality’ in every sense of the phrase.”Frazier concludes that “there is no need of comment on this other than that the authors add that this stand is not based on the inferiority of his race, but ‘because of our recognition that the principle of social equality is the only secure guarantee of social progress—the inevitable trend of evolution.’”20 Frazier developed this argument, wrapped in satire, in “The Pathology of Race Prejudice.” This radicalism—a militant opposition to segregation and support to social equality between Black and White people—remained constant throughout Frazier's writings.Frazier's subsequent renown as a sociologist, and Park's wide influence, often overshadow his five years in Atlanta. However, they were seminal in Frazier's personal, political, and intellectual development. The segregation of the South chafed Frazier. In Atlanta, “he openly broke with the segregationist system, in and out of academia,” according to Martina Mallocci, and found himself “on the most extreme fringes of the civil rights movement.”21 Frazier once stormed out of a segregated meeting of social workers; on another occasion, he demanded a White bank teller either call him “Mr. Frazier” or allow him to refer to the teller only by surname.22 In an article from 1924 in The Crisis about a visit to the optometrist, “All God's Chillun Got Eyes,” Frazier described how he had walked up to the thirteenth floor rather than use a Jim Crow elevator. Frazier tried to balance his self-respect and the reality of segregated education in the South.23In Atlanta, Frazier published thirty-three articles—a productivity to rival the lifetime output of many academics. Frazier's Atlanta writings fell into three broad groups.24 The first included essays about the Atlanta School that “were nothing more than column-length advertisements for the Atlanta School or for social work in general,” as Jonathan Scott Holloway describes them.25 The second group comprised articles on traditional academic subjects, such as “The Cooperative Movement in Denmark” and “Psychological Factors in Negro Health.”More controversial were articles against segregation and Black oppression, written in what Holloway calls “blunt language and style” that was “acerbic and highly opinionated.”26 Frazier directed these writings against Southern racists and middle-class Black leaders who accommodated themselves to Jim Crow degradation. In “The Negro and Non-Resistance,” published in The Crisis in March 1924, Frazier denounced “a growing number of colored people who arrogate to themselves the possession of such Christian humility that they must condemn the activities of the so-called agitators and others who insist that the Negro shall enjoy the same rights as other Americans.”27 Frazier excoriated those “spokesmen of the race, who assert that we are satisfied with an inferior status in American society.” He denounced them because “they refuse to protest against the greatest crime of the age—the denial of personality to the Negro.”28 In other words, half of Frazier's output was dedicated to advocating racial uplift and social work promoted by White foundations, and the other half was dedicated to defying this outlook.Frazier's tenure at the Atlanta School was equally contradictory. Although Frazier was no stranger to racial segregation, most of his experience had been in Baltimore or Washington, DC, not the Deep South. According to Frankie Adams, who began working at the Atlanta School several years after Frazier left, “Atlanta was solidly segregated in terms of eating places, streetcar transportation, and to some degree the opportunities to try on certain pieces of clothing in the various department stores.”29 In this segregated environment, the Atlanta School sought to create a cadre of Black social workers and social reformers to uplift the Black population in Atlanta and the South. Like the city's other Black universities and colleges, the Atlanta School depended on the support of Black elites in Atlanta and donations from liberal White foundations.Founded in 1920, the Atlanta School was the first Southern school dedicated to training Black social workers. The School admitted both men and women, had an interracial faculty who published in professional journals, and had courses that studied the Black experience. The school drew upon the model of sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (who had taught at Atlanta University decades earlier) in establishing high-quality scientific-based education for social workers that recognized the constraints of Jim Crow while challenging its intellectual underpinnings. In an essay about Black people in Georgia, published in The Messenger in June 1924, Frazier describes the state's racist history, but points to the “promising feature of the inter-racial situation [of] the attitude of those engaged in social welfare work.” Frazier describes how, at a state conference of social workers, “Negroes participated as other human beings, without being segregated as cattle or microbes, as is the orthodox way of dealing with bootlicking Negroes who submit to such humilities.” Frazier had one foot in what he would later term the Black bourgeoisie and another in Black radicalism.30Frazier's experience in Atlanta in the 1920s expanded rather than tempered the radicalism evidenced in his master's thesis. Frazier's “Pathology of Race Prejudice” reflected his intense feeling of equality, in the face of segregation. According to one study of social work in Atlanta, “The complete professionalization of the Atlanta School of Social Work occurred under Frazier,” who oversaw the school's incorporation and charter and move to its own downtown location.31 Despite this success, Frazier clashed with Helen Pendleton, an older White social worker. As Anthony Platt describes it, “Pendleton was in fact unusually liberal regarding race relations but still could not accept Frazier's having any authority over her.”32 Originally from West Virginia, Pendleton had earlier been a social worker in Baltimore; Greenwich, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; Pittsburgh; San Francisco; and Savannah, Georgia. According to New Jersey civil rights leader William Ashby, Pendleton had been “literally run out of South Carolina” as a youth for opposing discrimination and persecution of Black people there. Later, Pendleton was the executive secretary of the New Jersey Negro Welfare League (the predecessor of the Urban League), which helped Black newcomers adjust during the Great Migration. An article, “Cotton Pickers in Northern Cities,” from 1917 combines an acute sense of the discrimination confronting Black migrants from the South with a patronizing attitude towards these “unsophisticated country people.”33When Frazier started at the Atlanta School, he and Pendleton had equal rank and reported to the School's board of trustees. After the School was incorporated in 1924, Frazier became Pendleton's supervisor. According to Holloway, “Frazier and Pendleton became embattled over the office hierarchy, their responsibilities at the school, and the questionable proprietary of a black man giving orders to a white woman.” Frazier complained to the Board about Pendleton's long vacations, her insubordination, and her racist secretary, whereas “Pendleton appealed to the white members of the board and instilled in them a concern about Frazier's mental and psychological balance and his refusal to adjust to southern practices.”34Frazier wrote “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” years before his dispute with Pendleton culminated in his dismissal and decision to leave Atlanta, contrary to what the Afro-American wrote at the time and some academics have written since.35 In April 1927 Frazier applied for a fellowship from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial to finance his studies in Chicago; the curriculum vitae included with his application lists “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” as forthcoming in the June Forum.36 The Memorial's contact on the Atlanta School's Board of Trustees, Will Alexander, wrote to the Memorial, praising Frazier's ability but implying that he had problems getting along with other people and that further research experience would make him “less likely to become simply an agitator.”37 Alexander wrote again, two weeks later, clarifying that “Mr. Frazier's experience in the Atlanta School of Social Work should not be marked against him.” Although Alexander did “not consider that [Frazier] has the executive temperament,” he emphasized extenuating circumstances, including the fact that Frazier became director of the school when its original head suddenly died. “Mr. Frazier inherited a staff that would have been difficult for anyone to work with. I do not, therefore, consider that his reaction to the situation is an evidence that he cannot work harmoniously with his associates. Under other circumstances, I could conceive of the results having been quite different.”38 John Hope, president of Morehouse College, urged the Memorial to grant Frazier a scholarship and argued that Frazier's experience as director “has had a sobering and, I may say, a chastening effect upon him.”39In a State Department form that Frazier completed in 1953 for security clearance to work for UNESCO, he wrote that his employment at the Atlanta School ended when “I was fired because I advocated racial equality and democracy in the South.” 40 FBI agents, scouring Frazier's history for any evidence of subversion or communism, interviewed people at every place of employment that Frazier had listed, even visiting professorships. In Atlanta, three professors told the agents that John Hope had requested Frazier's resignation because “Dr. FRAZIER was apparently more interested in outside activities such as speeches and writing than he was in the administrative duties attached to the work of the Director of the School.”41 If the FBI interviews are accurate, we can conclude that although Frazier was not fired because of his article, similar writings and speeches had contributed to the Atlanta School's administration desire to see him leave. And the furor allowed Frazier to leave with his dignity intact, transforming what could have been a stain on his curriculum vitae into a demonstration of his bravery and opposition to Jim Crow and the Atlanta Black establishment and liberal foundations.One question is whether Frazier expected this strong reaction. “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” is powerful because it addresses the most volatile issues in American race relations: the sexual line drawn in blood and the definition of race. The inherent violence under slavery made sex (rape) between White men and Black women central to slavery. The distinctive “one drop rule” in the United States (