ABSTRACT
E. Franklin Frazier, who in 1948 became the first African American sociologist to be elected president of the American Sociological Society (now Association), was thirty-three years old and a seasoned social scientist by the time he came to the University of Chicago in 1927 to complete work on a doctorate in sociology. Frazier graduated cum laude from Howard University in 1916 before sociology was established as a curriculum. However, after working three years as a secondary teacher, Frazier earned a master’s degree in sociology from Clark University. From 1920 to 1921, Frazier was a research fellow at the New York School of Social Work where he conducted a study of the longshoremen of New York. Subsequently, from 1921 to 1922, Frazier studied in Denmark as a fellow of the American Scandinavian Foundation. Upon his return, Frazier accepted a position in Atlanta where he taught at Morehouse College and helped develop and direct the Atlanta School of Social Work. Here Frazier began writing about the Black family, and by the time he received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1931, Frazier had at least forty scholarly publications to his credit.1
