The Negro Family in the United States

E. Franklin Frazier;
Introduction and bibliography by Anthony Platt

The African American Intellectual Heritage

Howard University Professor E. Franklin Frazier’s 1939 book, The Negro Family in the United States, was the first comprehensive study of the family life of African Americans from slavery to the 1930s. Frazier insisted that the characteristics of the family were shaped by social conditions, not by race. His book set the terms for all future work on the subject.

Reviews

“Few studies have done as much to illuminate the obscure processes of social change as this thoroughgoing treatment of the Negro family in the United States. Dr. Frazier’s researches have contributed facts so pertinent and hypotheses so penetrating as to command the attention of all interested in the processes of family adjustment and change… the study is a most important contribution to the literature on the family.” — American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals

“The book is both extremely well organized and engagingly written; not the least ingredient of its charm is the almost Biblical terminology of the titles given its parts and chapters.” — Nation

“This book should help to check the too frequent tendency to assume that it is possible to generalize about the Negro, for it reveals wide variations in the standards of different social classes among the coloured population, as well as the still wider variations in the behaviour of different individuals.” — Times Literary Supplement