Seven Oaks Magazine.

With last year’s semicentennial commemoration of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, we have entered the season of 50-year anniversaries of the African American civil rights movement. 2005 marks 50 years since the Montgomery bus boycott projected the black freedom movement onto the national consciousness. Perhaps less noteworthy, 1955 is also when E. Franklin Frazier published the original edition of his notorious Black Bourgeoisie. It’s not obvious what we should make of the concurrence of these two events, nor is any connection between the two immediately apparent. As everyone knows, Rosa Parks’s refusal to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus galvanized all classes in the black community to work together to set in motion the beginning of the end of American apartheid. In light of this manifestation of racial unity against segregation, Frazier’s brief against the black middle class appears ill timed and rather out of touch. But read with its Cold War context in mind, Black Bourgeoisie – Frazier’s indulgences in caricature notwithstanding – serves as an important reminder that at mid century, while pathways in the struggle against racism were being cleared, other routes to liberation were being sealed off. Half a century later, we are still living with the consequences of that paradox.

Political realities in the Cold War United States both enabled and inhibited the black freedom struggle’s agenda for change. During the decade preceding Montgomery and Black Bourgeoisie, the dissolution of the black left created a situation in which struggles for racial justice were able to proceed provided that movement demands were couched within the confines of liberal discourse. In other words, critiques of political economy and foreign policy were deemed unacceptable after World War II, while African American integration into existing economic hierarchies and systems of imperial rule received hesitant, but increasing support from the federal government. At the war’s end, the United States endeavored to meet numerous prerequisites to sustaining the international system of free enterprise: propping up the devastated economies of the major capitalist countries, containing communism, securing international markets in which to sell American goods and invest surplus wartime profits, acquiring dependable sources of raw materials, and establishing military hegemony. Because of the Soviet spotlight on American racism, and because people of color in the global South were understandably wary of American claims to represent freedom and democracy, racial segregation within the United States impeded this sweeping agenda. Despite the massive white resistance to racial equality, the Cold War situation gave African Americans a very real chance to depose Jim Crow.

Given the unprecedented, though limited, prospects that Cold War conditions made possible, why would Frazier pick such a seemingly inopportune moment to excoriate the black leadership class? Answering this question requires us to explore the significance of what the liberal Cold War movement agenda left out. But before moving to that discussion, I must make some remarks about who E. Franklin Frazier was, and explain the argument of Black Bourgeoisie.

Born in Baltimore in 1894, Frazier received his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1931, where he studied with Robert Park. Park, a leading light in what was then commonly called “race relations,” elaborated under the rubric of “social ecology” an assimilationist social scientific paradigm that theorized eventual African American integration into the putative natural economic order. Frazier’s Chicago dissertation on black culture and the black family drew criticism from anthropologist Melville Herskovits on the question of transatlantic cultural continuity, but later significantly informed Gunnar Myrdal and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s moral and psychological explanations of African American oppression and poverty. Frazier’s interwar intellectual output made a noteworthy, albeit problematic, contribution to questions of race and culture.

Cultural debates aside, there was a side to Frazier that underscored the economic dimension of race. At the 1933 NAACP Second Amenia Conference, he and other young intellectuals championed an explicitly leftist economic agenda; he worked with members of the Communist Party while a faculty member at Fisk and Howard; and when asked by New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to direct a commission into the causes of the 1935 Harlem race riot, Frazier praised the CP’s work both during the event and at subsequent hearings. Indeed, in left leaning interwar Harlem , he was not the only one to do so.

Frazier’s economic critiques and leftist tendencies fit comfortably within Depression-era black American politics, but by the 1950s such ideologies were becoming increasingly anathema to African American leaders and to the nation in general. Yet despite the conformist political climate of the Cold War, Frazier refused to surrender his intellectual independence, as exemplified by his support for the embattled W.E.B. Du Bois, whose own Cold War leftist commitments resulted in his being abandoned, as fate would have it, by the talented tenth.

Black Bourgeoisie can only be understood against this historical backdrop. Frazier’s indictment of the black middle class hinges on his juxtaposition between “the world of reality” and “the world of make believe,” which structures his two-part argument. Frazier describes the black bourgeoisie as white-collar workers whose education orients them away from the African American working class, and encourages an emulation of the white propertied classes. Reaffirming his earlier work on cultural survivals, Frazier argues that “the black bourgeoisie has been uprooted from its ‘racial’ tradition and as a consequence has no cultural roots in either the Negro or the white world.” Having abandoned black workers, the black middle class in Frazier’s view use their new found pecuniary success to indulge in a false sense of superiority behind the segregated veil of the larger society. As one of the most powerful sectors of black business, the black press claims to speak for the entire African American community while only advancing bourgeois interests within it, one example being editorial timidity when covering international colonial issues. In the end, unwilling to face the economic underpinnings of segregation, members of the black middle class feel acute insecurity, anxiety, and self-hatred in their unfulfilled quest for inclusion into the white world of property.

Fifty years after its publication, Black Bourgeoisie reads as both overstated and prescient. Frazier exaggerated black middle-class capitulation to the Jim Crow racial order, and underestimated the black bourgeoisie’s willingness to join with black working class people to bring down that order in the face of violent white resistance. Yet his attention to the ways that some successful African Americans put limits on the black freedom agenda holds important lessons for how historians might trace the roots of black class divisions, and how contemporary commentators might begin to make sense of figures such as Condoleezza Rice or Bill Cosby.Black Bourgeoisie, seen in its Cold War context, also reminds us of the extent to which the moment of antiracist promise at the victory over fascism in 1945 has receded in recent history into burgeoning prison construction expanding racialized poverty on a global scale.

Yet Frazier’s book also recalls the continuity of that strain of thought that was not silenced in the McCarthyite period, and persisted in articulating antiracism, internationalism, and a political economy critique. Frazier – his contributions to the Moynihan thesis and its lamentable hold on the imagination of policy makers notwithstanding – joins a long list of critics whose analysis of white supremacy did not conform to Cold War orthodoxies. W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Herbert Aptheker, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Claudia Jones, Eric Williams, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Grace Lee Boggs, Robert Williams, Albert Memmi, C.L.R. James, Ella Baker, Jack O’Dell, and Frazier’s own student, Stokely Carmichael are only a few representatives of this tradition. As the current threats to dissent once again encourage political conformity, and with racism and the class divide very much still with us, Frazier’s economic insights are as relevant at 50 as when first published.