Frazier, E. Franklin 199Frazier, E. Franklin
Dr. Edward Franklin Frazier (1894–1962), a black sociolo-
gist and educator, became one of the principal voices in the
Africanisms debate, which included such notable scholars
as Melville Herskovits, Lorenzo Dow Turner, and W. E. B.
Du Bois. Born in Maryland at the height of the black nadir,
Frazier graduated from Baltimore’s Colored High School in
1912 and attended Howard University to study Latin, Greek,
German, and mathematics. Aft er graduating from Howard,
he taught throughout the South until 1919, when he en-
rolled in graduate school at Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts. Frazier earned a master’s degree in sociol-
ogy and became a research fellow at the New York School of
Social Work in 1920. In 1922, he began a two-year teaching
stint at Morehouse College before serving as the director of
the Atlanta School of Social Work until 1927. Aft er earning
a PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1931,
Frazier taught at Fisk University for three years. In 1934,
he became chair of Howard University’s sociology depart-
ment, a position he held until his retirement in 1959.
Author of more than 10 books and dozens of journal
articles, Frazier contributed to a number of scholarly de-
bates and was widely recognized as the leading authority on
the black family in America. His distinguished career led to
a number of achievements. Frazier earned a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1940; he became the fi rst black president of
the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1948; and
for his lifetime contributions to the fi eld of sociology, Fra-
zier was a recipient of the ASA’s MacIver Award. Despite
the universal acclaim for his contributions, Frazier was
not averse to controversy and took a number of unpopular
stances throughout his long career. While an instructor at
Morehouse College, Frazier published an article titled “Th e
Pathology of Race Prejudice,” which associated racism with
mental illness. Although this conclusion has become ac-
cepted by many social scientists, in 1927, it cost Frazier his
teaching position at Morehouse and was one of the factors
that prompted his move to Chicago.
Perhaps the most signifi cant controversy Frazier was
involved in was the so-called Africanisms debate and his
long-standing rivalry with anthropologist Melville Her-
skovits. Th e opening salvo in the debate was launched in
1939 with the publication of Frazier’s Th e Negro Family in
the United States. Championing what became known as theon people, including salt. Indeed, the salt that was used to
preserve food shipped from abroad to America was linked
both with the themes of forced exile and with the food
eaten by the white tormentors. Th us, eating salt or salty
food meant submitting to the whites. As opposed to that,
protecting oneself from absorbing salt refl ected one’s ability
to escape domination and thus one’s power to fl y. Wh at i s
more, the act of refusing to eat salt was a way of expressing
one’s faith. Th is is why the symbol of salt is recurrent in fl y-
ing African stories, as Monica Schuler analyses it in Drums
& Shadows.
Flying African stories, orally transmitted from gen-
eration to generation, provided the means to bypass the
offi cial version of history and the dominant culture. Th e
symbol of the fl ying African reveals a power of imagination
and a creative drive on the African Americans’ part. It also
permits transcendence of the absence of representation
and the denial of orality in the cultural landscape. Eventu-
ally, the symbol of the fl ying African came to illustrate the
widely signifi cant theme of a return to the roots, as in, for
instance, the case of “Flying Home” by Ralph W. Ellison,
who titled his short story aft er the famous jazz piece by
Lionel Hampton. In this story, Ellison provides the reader
with a transposition of the myth of fl ying Africans by
confronting its signifi cation with the themes of the color
line, forbidden social ascension, and the perilous denial of
one’s roots.
Th e fl ying African stories present a mimetic transposi-
tion of the search for transcendence. Th ey also evoke the
theme of disappearance as a contrapuntal answer to bond-
age and earthly suff ering.
See also: Africanisms; Ebo Landing; Gullah; Transmigration
Valerie Caruana-LoiselBibliography
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Reprint, New York: Marlowe, 1996.
Cumberdance, Daryl. 400 Years of African American Folktale from
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Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. Th e Norton Anthology of
African American Literature. New York: Norton, 1996.
Georgia Writers’ Project. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies
among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Savannah: University of
Georgia Press, 1986.
Hamilton, Virginia. Th e People Could Fly: American Black Folk-
tales. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Schuler, Monica. “Afro-American Slave Culture.” Historical Refl ec-
tions 6 (1979):121–55.