FRAZIER, E(DWARD) FRANKLIN

born Sept. 24, 1894, Baltimore, Md., U.S. died May 17, 1962, Washington, D.C. E. Franklin Frazier. American sociologist whose work on black social structure provided insights into and solutions to many of the problems affecting the black community. Frazier received his A.B. from Howard University (1916) and his A.M. in sociology from Clark University (1920). After being awarded a fellowship to the New York School of Social Work (192021), he accepted an American-Scandinavian Foundation grant to study folk high schools and the Cooperative Movement in Denmark (192122). He taught sociology at Morehouse College, Atlanta, where he organized the Atlanta University School of Social Work (for blacks), later becoming its director. With the controversy surrounding the publication (1927) of The Pathology of Race Prejudice in Forum, Frazier was forced to leave Morehouse. He received a fellowship from the University of Chicago (1927), where he took his Ph.D. (1931). Publication of his thesis, The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), sustained the university's interest in his work on the black family. He taught at Fisk University (192934) and then at Howard University (from 1934). He served as director of the Division of Applied Social Sciences UNESCO (195153), where he worked on the Tension and Social Change Project, assessing the interactions between people of different races and cultures and the effect of these interactions on each community. His writings include The Negro Family in the United States (1939), among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black. He also wrote Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940) and Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957), which dealt with African studies.