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Historian and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier dies.
1962 (May 17)
Sociologist and historian E. Franklin Frazier died in Washington, D.C. Frazier was the author of Black Bourgeoisie, the controversial book that argued middle-class Blacks were isolating themselves from poverty-stricken Blacks. Frazier, born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 24, 1894, was a Howard University graduate. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1931 but returned to Howard three years later to begin a twenty- five-year affiliation with their sociology department. Eventually he was appointed chairman of the department. Before his retirement from Howard in 1959, he interrupted his tenure to teach at Columbia University and New York University, among others. He had traveled to Brazil and the West Indies as a Guggenheim Fellow in the early 1940s, and he was made president of the American Sociological Society in 1948. For the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Frazier served as chairman of The Committee of Experts on Race and chief of the organization's Applied Science Division in Paris. A recognized authority on the Black family, Frazier wrote The Negro Family in the United States, The Negro in the United States, The Negro Church in America, The Free Negro Family and Race, and Culture Contacts in the Modern World.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.