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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, beginning with colonial-era slavery, extending through the years of slavery and emancipation, to the impact of Jim Crow and migrations to both southern and northern cities in the twentieth century. Frazier discussed all the themes that have concerned subsequent students of the African American family, including matriarchy and patriarchy, the impact of slavery on family solidarity and personal identity, the impact of long-term poverty and lack of access to education, migration and rootlessness, and the relationship between family and community. Frazier insisted that the characteristics of the family were shaped not by race, but by social conditions.

Anthony Platt is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, and author of E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered.

Reviews

“Originally published in 1939, Frazier’s classic work has become the reference point for social scientists researching the African-American family. Platt’s new introduction places Frazier’s work in historical context and offers an annotated bibliography of significant recent studies and memoirs of the African-American family experience.” — Multicultural Review

Reviews of the 1939 original edition: “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