Between Scorn and Longing: Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie

Author(s): Anthony M. Platt

Source: Social Justice , Spring-Summer 1993, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (51-52), Rethinking Race
(Spring-Summer 1993), pp. 129-139
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options

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Between Scorn and Longing:
Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie
Anthony M. Platt

Introduction

Franklin Frazier (1894-1962) is generally remembered for two lega

cies, both the subject of considerable controversy. First, his work on the
M J. African American family is praised by his supporters for its historical
scope and empirical rigor, while his detractors accuse Frazier of initiating the
"pathological" critique of the matriarchal household and laying the groundwork
for the notorious Moynihan Report. Second, he is remembered, either fondly or
irritably, as the scurrilous polemicist who cavalierly scribbled Black Bourgeoisie
while enjoying gourmet lunches in Parisian bistros in the early 1950s.
When Black Bourgeoisie was finally published in the United States in 1957,
two years after the French edition, Frazier become an instant celebrity who was in
demand as a speaker and made good copy in the African American press. The
American Sociological Association presented him with the Maclver Award,
which he found amusing because he regarded the book as more of a debunking
satire than serious scholarship. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the limelight during his
last years and willingly made the rounds of sorority clubs, Negro associations,
academic groups, and charity banquets where he "flung critical and witty barbs at
middle class colored Americans" in the audience.1 Undergraduates crowded into
his classes at Howard to hear him berate them for aspiring to enter a world of
delusions and "nothingness."2 And after his death in 1962, newly radicalized
students discovered Frazier and used Black Bourgeoisie as ammunition against
old guards everywhere.
Frazier's work on the African American middle class is generally regarded as
peripheral to his serious scholarship on race relations and the African American
family. "Impressionistic" or "Menckenesque burlesque" are typical characteriza?
tions of Black Bourgeoisie? The issues raised in Frazier's 1955 book, however,
were both a political concern and object of serious study throughout his life, from

Anthony M. Platt is professor of social work, California State University, Sacramento, CA 95825.
This essay is adapted from his latest book, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1991).

Social Justice Vol. 20, Nos. 1-2 129

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 130 Platt

his first polemic in 1918 ? in which he rebuked the "priestly class" for "turning
nations into stone and the past into sacredness" (Frazier, 1918) ? to his last essay
in 1962 ? in which he berated black intellectuals for their "abject conformity in
thinking" (Frazier, 1962). Even after his death, Frazier could still be heard
expressing the same message, as disgruntled as ever with the "petty tyrants in the
Negro churches" and "their counterparts in practically all other Negro organiza?
tions."4
Frazier's own class history gave him particular insights into the dilemmas of
the black bourgeoisie. His father, a self-taught bank messenger who died when his
son was only 10 years old, left Frazier with a fierce thirst for knowledge and
upward mobility. While the young Edward decided quite early that he was an
atheist with an unshakable contempt for organized religion, he inherited his
father's commitment to the Protestant Ethic. At college, for example, he pursued
a rigorous program of self-improvement. Coming from "a family that did not have
a literary tradition," Frazier decided to take four years of English courses in college
and "by writing a composition every day, I learned to write" (Frazier, 1961). It was
this kind of initiative and drive that enabled Frazier to climb out of the ghetto, yet
it was not enough to enable him to succeed in the meritocratic world of the white
professional middle classes. For all his accomplishments ? the first African
American president of the American Sociological Association (1948), author of
the first serious textbook on The Negro in the United States (1949), consultant to
the United Nations ? he was never offered a tenure-track job in a predominantly
white university and the praise he received from his professional peers for his
contributions as a Negro social scientist was intentionally backhanded.
Frazier certainly knew firsthand the world of the black bourgeoisie. As a young
man he had learned a great deal about middle-class customs and foibles from his
in-laws, pillars of religious respectability in North Carolina, and later he was
sharply observant of his wife's social set in Washington, D.C. As somebody who
taught in every kind of African-American school and college, he was also well
attuned to the nuances of segregated professionalism. He even once boasted that
he wrote so truthfully about his subject matter because "I am a black bourgeois,"5
but it is more likely that his powerful insights derived not so much from his
membership in, but rather from his marginality to, a stratum that served as both a
refuge and a prison.
Like the "scholarship boys" in the English working class of the 1950s, captured
so poignantly by Richard Hoggart (1957: 291-304), Frazier wavered between
"scorn and longing." On the one hand, he was "equipped for hurdle-jumping" and
had "been trained like a circus-horse, for scholarship winning." On the other hand,
he was "at the friction-point of two cultures," uprooted from a sense of moorings,
"gnawed by self-doubt," still the odd man out whose ability was both "a mark of
pride and almost a brand."
Frazier's lifetime work on the middle class was complex and contradictory,

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 Between Scorn and Longing: Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie 131

never fixed or simple minded. He is, of course, best remembered for Black
Bourgeoisie, which was written late in his life and at a time of growing cynicism
and despair. By this time, however, his views had gone through various permuta?
tions and transformations.

A Social Conception of Wealth

In the 1920s, Frazier' s perspective on the black bourgeoisie was extraordinary

eclectic, a mixture of ideas that he gleaned from W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T.
Washington, and the social-democratic socialism of the Messenger crowd. From
Du Bois, Frazier borrowed the principle that the "Talented Tenth" had a moral and
social responsibility to provide both cultural and political-economic leadership in
African American communities. While an undergraduate at Howard (1912?
1916), Frazier heard Du Bois lecture about contemporary issues and he listened
carefully when the leader of the New Negro movement appealed to students'
idealism, urging them to pursue careers that would give them the joy of accom?
plishment and social responsibility, rather than the "rolling up of wealth" (Howard
University Journal, April 17, 1914: 2-3).
After he left Howard, Frazier was impressed with such organizations as the
Neighborhood Union in Atlanta and the Fort Valley High and Industrial School in
Georgia, where teachers, social workers, and ministers worked hard to build
indigenous community institutions.6 In this sense at least, he shared Booker T.
Washington's prescription for self-reliance. In 1921 to 1922, Frazier traveled to
Denmark to study the farm cooperatives and rural schools that, a decade earlier,
had demonstrated to Washington "that it pays to educate the man farthest down"
(Washington, 1912: 340). Frazier was similarly impressed with the cooperative
movement in Denmark and thought that Southern blacks could learn from an
economic system that combined the best of individual thrift and collective
methods of production and distribution (Frazier, 1923b: 479-484). Frazier was an
avid reader of the Messenger, which at that time also was urging the beleaguered
black petty bourgeoisie to embrace a cooperative system of economics.7
When Frazier went to teach social work in Atlanta in 1922 after his return from
Denmark, he was hopeful that credit unions, cooperative marketing, and other
forms of collective enterprise would develop in the South. "A great step towards
economic emancipation," he wrote in his first article for Crisis (1923c: 228-229),
"could be achieved through the development of cooperative enterprises in many
centers of Negro population." Such a program, he argued, offered "safe invest?
ment opportunities for small quantities of capital" and were "in harmony with the
present tendency towards the democratization of wealth. It is needless for us to go
through the cruder stages of individualistic enterprise before we reach a social
conception of the nature of wealth" (Frazier, 1924a: 293-297). Frazier hoped that
black businesses would strive toward "true industrial democracy" and facilitate a
"wide distribution of the economic surplus of the group" (Frazier, 1924b: 508).

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 132 Platt

Frazier's brief experience with cooperatives in Denmark guided his political

and economic views for several years. In 1925, he was still trying to convince an
old friend that cooperatives were the "best means" to "amass capital through the
mobilization of small amounts."8 By 1928, however, he recognized that with the
failure of "black radicals" to go south and teach "landless peasants any type of self
help," the cooperative movement was now a Utopian vision, promising nothing but
false hopes.9 A few years later when Du Bois flirted with a cooperative program,
Frazier now dismissed the idea for its romanticism and economic stupidity. "What
could be more fantastic," he asked in 1935, than Du Bois' "program for a separate
non-profit economy within American capitalism?" (Frazier, 1935a: 13). This
disenchantment with the possibility of democratically controlled economic enter?
prises led Frazier to a much more realistic and pessimistic assessment of African
American entrepreneurs.

La Bourgeoisie Noire

Frazier's critique of the black bourgeoisie was alluded to in various articles

duringthe 1920s, hinted at in his essay for Alain Locke's TheNewNegro, and fully
elaborated for the first time in 1928 in an article written for Modern Quarterly. As
with his initial optimism about cooperatives, so Frazier hoped that black entrepre?
neurs would do their part to raise "the general economic level of our group" rather
than aspire to "peaks of affluence to dazzle the mob" (Frazier, 1924a: 293-297).
Based on his apparent enthusiasm for the potentiality of African American
business, Alain Locke sought him out to contribute an essay to The New Negro
about the "real Negro economic start" that was underway in Durham, North
Carolina.10
In the famous Durham article, Frazier attempts to straddle the fence. At first
reading, it is a purely descriptive and appreciative discussion of how the "Negro
is at last developing a middle class" and acquiring the "spirit of modern enterprise"
in banking and insurance. A close reading, however, reveals nuances of irony and
parody submerged within its uncritical ambience. The black bourgeoisie, noted
Frazier, has:

the same outlook on life as the middle class everywhere.... White men
have recognized these men as the supporters of property rights. They
know these men would no more vote for Debs than they. Yet, there are
still Jim Crow cars in North Carolina, and the Negro is denied civil and
political rights (Frazier, 1925b: 333-340).

These subversive subtexts, however, constituted a fraction of the overall

article, which, like the total contents of The New Negro, were designed, in Locke's
words, to "celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of
group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age" (Ibid.: 16). Perhaps

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Between Scorn and Longing: Frazier* s Black Bourgeoisie 133

Frazier decided to be diplomatic and tactful for once; perhaps he settled for a bland
neutrality because it was flattering to be included in Locke's coterie. Whatever
Frazier's motivation, the Durham article, though not explicitly misrepresenting
his views, did not accurately represent them.
In the late 1920s, Frazier tried to sort out his ambivalence about the cultural
renaissance in African American, urban centers. On the one hand, he participated
in and was recognized as a leader of the New Negro movement. On the other, he
regarded its development with skepticism and mistrust. Even when he was at his
most optimistic about the progressive and social role that black-owned businesses
could play in local communities, he always had his doubts and was on the lookout
for betrayal. In the early 1920s, for example, Frazier endorsed the Messenger's
views about the need for self-defense and meeting white violence with black
violence ? what he described as a "positive moral force" ? and was very critical
of "those Negro leaders who through cowardice and for favors deny that the Negro
desires the same treatment as other men." He hated "this sort of self-abasement"
posturing as "Christian humility."11 To make his point, he recalled the example of
a white philanthropist who donated large sums of money for black education in the
South. All went well until she attended a meeting where she met "Negroes as
cultured and as intelligent as white people!" She left, "guilty and dismayed,"
determined never to support this cause again. "Her attitude towards Negroes,"
concluded Frazier (1924d: 76), "was primarily that of a kindly lady who has
sponsored a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, but naturally resents
rescued dogs, for example, assuming roles reserved for homo sapiens"
Looking for an opportunity to correct the favorable impressions of the New
Negro that might have been communicated by his Durham article, Frazier seized
his chance when V.F. Calverton, editor of the leftist Modern Quarterly, asked him
to submit "an article on the harmful influence of bourgeois psychology on the
Negro movement, or something of the sort."12 Some two weeks later, Frazier
completed his critique of La Bourgeoisie Noire, titled in French, suggests Harold
Cruse (1967:154), "no doubt to camouflage his Negro self-criticism." Frazier may
have shown some prudence in his choice of title, but the contents were quite
candid. Gone was the oblique innuendo of the Durham piece.
There are essentially two themes in La Bourgeoisie Noire. First, Frazier
attempted to explain why "the Negro, the man farthest down in the economic as
well as social scale, steadily refuses to ally himself with radical groups in
America." To do this, he contested the widely held notion that the African
American community was monolithic and homogeneous, pointing out that it was
"highly differentiated" and that industrial workers, who were more likely to have
a revolutionary consciousness, constituted only a small percentage of black
workers. Second ? and here Frazier propels himself into the controversy that
would last a lifetime?he analyzed the conservative role played by the new, rising
middle class and its cultural spokesperson, the New Negro, in ensuring that

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 134 Platt

"bourgeois ideals are implanted in the Negro's mind." He sadly noted the demise
of the postwar black radical movement, typified by the Messenger, which had
degenerated from an "organ of the struggling masses" to a "mouthpiece of Negro
capitalists."
Frazier was critical of the New Negro movement, not because of its national?
ism, but because under the encouragement of its white patrons, it had retreated into
a narrow and depoliticized concept of culture. Black cultural workers were willing
to settle for "Negro in Art Week" in return for agreeing "not to compete with the
white man either politically or economically." The New Negro movement,
concluded Frazier, "looks askance at the new rising class of black capitalism while
it basks in the sun of white capitalism." Meanwhile, black businessmen were by
now only interested in conspicuous consumption and a "society of equals" was the
last thing on their minds (Frazier, 1928a).
In the same way that Frazier brought a class analysis to bear on cultural issues,
so he also refused to accept a view of African American communities as uniform,
passive victims of white racism. What made Frazier's approach controversial and
subversive was his exploration of the dynamics of collusion and collaboration,
notably the opportunism of "Negro leaders who through cowardice and for favors
deny that the Negro desires the same treatment as other men."13 This was hardly
a popular endeavor given the prevailing efforts of organizations like the NAACP
and NUL to focus on how all blacks were equally oppressed by racism. To Frazier
(1949: 91), many African American leaders were the descendants of the "waiting
men" who betrayed Denmark Vesey. From early on in the 1920s, he had little faith
in the new urban middle class who, on the basis of "a little education or turn of
fortune," all too readily turned their backs on the "mass of Negroes" and was eager
to "damn the black, greasy, boisterous Negro peasant in one breath and boast of
their pride in Negro ancestry in the next" (Frazier, 1928b). Similarly, he had little
patience for interracial ambassadors, well-meaning black and white liberals who
encouraged cooperation without challenging the roots of segregation. To the New
Negro crowd, in the words of historian David Lewis (1989: 115), "there was
nothing wrong with American society that interracial elitism could not cure."
Frazier, however, had nothing but contempt for any program that hinted of
paternalism or noblesse oblige. "The Negro does not want love. He wants justice"
(Frazier, 1924c).
Not surprisingly, Frazier's critique of academic do-gooders and civil-rights
careerists did not endear him to most of his professional colleagues. Yet he also
came under occasional criticism from leftists. For example, as Oliver Cox (1970:
15-31) correctly pointed out, Frazier's class analysis was theoretically imprecise
and stretched almost beyond recognition Marxist conceptions of productive and
economic relations. Frazier's muddled middle class included skilled workers and
foremen, service and clerical workers, as well as professionals and petty entrepre?
neurs. Frazier took this kind of criticism seriously. "The term 'middle class' as

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Between Scorn and Longing: Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie 135

used here," he wrote in his 1949 textbook, "refers to the class having an
intermediate status between the upper and lower classes in the Negro community.
Only a relatively small upper layer of this class is 'middle class' in the general
American meaning of the term" (Frazier, 1949: 301). Even though Frazier's
framework focused on political and cultural factors, his overall analysis suffered
from a lack of economic sophistication. The black bourgeoisie was of course in
reality a petit bourgeoisie, but Frazier's writings told us very little about the
relations of this stratum to the grand bourgeoisie or the corporate economy. This
was a weakness that Frazier himself recognized and tried to correct in his last major
work, Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957).

Embittered Critique

Frazier's assessment of the black bourgeoisie in 1928 formed the basis of his
later writings on this topic; his views hardly changed in 30 years. He elaborated
his critique, deepened his analysis, and became more vitriolic in the 1950s, but at
the core was the argument he formulated in the 1920s. Through the 1930s, he
sustained his fierce attack on African American leadership, accusing Du Bois of
aspiring to be "king" of the "Black Ghetto" and exposing James Weldon Johnson
and other civil-rights leaders for their opportunism and unwillingness to "risk their
own security" (Frazier, 1935a: 11-13; 1935b: 129-131). As for black business?
men, they dreamed of a "Black Utopia where the black middle class could exploit
the black workers without white competition" (1938: 497).
After World War II, Frazier found his critique confirmed by the growth of an
urban petty bourgeoisie, as lawyers, realtors, and shop owners took their place
alongside the teachers and preachers who had traditionally wielded local power
within black communities. This stratum, argued Frazier (1947: 75-75, 99-100),
had quickly developed "vested interests" in the "system of segregation," from
which they derived the "exclusive enjoyment of...social and material rewards."
His 1949 textbook, bolstered by Abram Harris' The Negro as Capitalist and other
recent studies, reiterated his critique of the "marginal position of Negro enter?
prises" and "their insignificant role in the economy of the nation" (Frazier, 1949:
409, 412).
In the last years of his life, Frazier returned to the issues that had preoccupied
him during the 1920s. The publication of Black Bourgeoisie, first in France in 1955
and then in the United States in 1957, plus the resurgence of the Civil Rights
Movement in the South, reawakened his interest. The book contained nothing new
in the way of analysis or interpretation, though its style was even more acerbic and
polemical than before. Here was the familiar history of stratification within black
communities, the expose of the "myth of Negro business" ? sustained, noted
Frazier with a new turn of phrase, by "Negro businessmen [who] can best be
described as 'lumpen-bourgeoisie'" ? and a savage demystification of the "world
of make-believe into which the black bourgeoisie has sought an escape from its

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 136 Platt

inferiority and frustrations in American society" (Frazier, 1965: 173, 237).

The next notable shift in Frazier's analysis of the black bourgeoisie occurred
when he came into contact with Third World intellectuals and leftists during his
two years (1951-1953) in Paris as chief of the Division of Applied Social Sciences
in UNESCO. As a result of this exposure to global issues, he began to compare the
African American middle class with "colored middlemen" and "compradors"
around the world. He was struck by the similarities between the black bourgeoisie
back home, "increasingly bewildered and frustrated in the white man's world,"
and the new native bourgeoisie of decolonized nations, who, in the words of one
commentator, were "like derelicts, frantically seeking some foothold of security
for body and mind." Frazier relearned the important lesson that it was not
inevitable that the middle classes play a conservative and coopted role. A choice
had to be made, sides had to be taken. Frazier pointed to the positive example of
Kwame Nkrumah, future president of Ghana, who expressed "a deep understand?
ing and sympathy for the aspirations of the masses of Africans [and] wanted to
make the nationalistic movement a mass movement" (Frazier, 1957: 293, 295,
300).
Increasingly, Frazier was impressed by nationalism in Africa and was much
more hopeful about its revolutionary potential than about the potential of its
counterpart in the United States. Though he was encouraged by the Civil Rights
Movement stirring in the South and welcomed the new "militant spirit" of college
students (Frazier, 1956: 7-8), he continued to argue that African American
leadership "has no sense of responsibility to the Negro masses and exploits them
whenever an opportunity offers itself (Frazier, 1955:26-32). He warned the new
African nations to look out for "American Negroes [who] may go to Africa as
advisers and specialists" because "they will go as Americans representing Ameri?
can interests, not African interests." When asked in 1959 by Presence Africaine,
"What can the American Negro contribute to the social development of Africa?"
his embittered response was, "Very little" (Frazier, 1959: 263-278).
A few weeks before he died in 1962, Frazier's last essay was published in
Negro Digest. In "The Failure of the Negro Intellectual," he sounded a familiar
theme, condemning his colleagues for failing "to dig down into the experience of
the Negro and provide the soul of a people." Do not "run from Du Bois and Paul
Robeson," he pleaded (Frazier, 1962: 34-36). Despite his political differences
with Du Bois and Robeson over the years ? whether it was Du Bois' call to "close
ranks" during World War I or Robeson's uncritical defense of the Communist
Party?they were heroic figures to Frazier because they risked their own personal
security, willingly stood up to all kinds of establishments, and then held their
ground, no matter how unpopular. Ideology aside, Frazier admired this kind of
intransigence of principle and personal stubbornness. Even after Du Bois was
hounded by McCarthyist witch-hunts in the 1950s and abandoned by most
liberals, black and white, Frazier refused to back down from his public support of

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Between Scorn and Longing: Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie 137

the "man who raised the big moral questions having to do with racism, exploita?
tion, and imperialism."14
During Frazier's last decade, he became quite despondent about the prospects
for equality in the United States. His previous polemics and social criticism had
generally included proposals or counterproposals. Now they became one-sided,
mostly critique with little program, and there was a predominant edge of cynicism
to the "enfant terrible"" as he once liked to call himself. From his undergraduate
days at Howard through the 1930s, Frazier's commitment had been sustained and
shaped by social movements and innovative radical politics that attempted to unite
struggles for economic and social justice. Though he always operated on the fringe
of organizations and protected his ideological independence, he was deeply
involved in the political culture of the civil rights, socialist, and nationalist
movements. As these movements collapsed after World War II and he searched
for a new identification in the context of global movements, Frazier's political
commitments within the United States became sporadic and more vicarious, and
Frazier became increasingly disillusioned with the possibility that such commit?
ments by themselves could be effective. During the 1950s, he had become
alienated from both a defensive Left and an increasingly anticommunist and
legalistic NA ACP. He and many of the people he admired, especially Robeson and
Du Bois, were ostracized by the overwhelming majority of the black bourgeoisie
who succumbed to the pressures of McCarthyism. The "waiting men" had
returned to close the circle of betrayal.
Unfortunately, his subjectivity got the better of him in his last years as he
became more and more estranged from political movements in the United States.
His critiques of the black bourgeoisie sounded increasingly dogmatic because he
continued to apply an analysis that was well grounded prior to World War II, but
did not take into account changing conditions in the 1950s. For example, his last
book, The Negro Church in America, published posthumously in this country,
stressed the "stifling domination" that religious leaders exercised over African
American communities. It was an old and plausible argument that he made for
several years, quite consistent with his overall assessment of the middle class. In
the mid-1950s, when he was writing this book, however, sectors of the Negro
church had begun to play a prominent and militant role in the Civil Rights
Movement. His failure to address these contradictions and possibilities ? as he
did when examining political movements in Africa and Asia in Race and Culture
Contacts in the Modern World ? made Frazier's analysis rigid and revealed how
much he had become out of touch with the new activism.

Conclusion

An historical journey through Frazier's writings on the black bourgeoisie

suggests a much more complex and contradictory analysis than that commonly
associated with the fiery and disillusioned dogmatist of the late 1950s. Overall, we

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 138 Platt

have much to appreciate and reconsider in his work. At a time when African
Americans were being reduced to homogeneous stereotypes ? "saints" or
"stones," to use his phrase ? he fought to document the diversity and complexity
of black families, communities, and politics. However economically ingenuous,
he recognized the importance of class analysis and the political contradictions
raised by middle-class leadership of mass movements. He continually urged his
peers who, like himself, had been both smart and lucky enough to climb out of
misery, always to remember their cultural roots and their social obligations. Do not
be "seduced by dreams of final assimilation," he told them (Frazier, 1962:26-36).
With African American businesses as marginal to the corporate economy as they
were 30 years ago, with the black middle class still on the periphery of national
political power, and with the New Right recruiting its first significant cadre of
black neoconservatives, Frazier's insights seem as fresh and heretical as ever.

NOTES

1. For a typical account of a Frazier speech to a black sorority luncheon, see Afro-American
(August 26, 1958).
2. "The black bourgeoisie suffers from 'nothingness' because when Negroes attain middle-class
status, their lives generally lose both content and significance" See E. Franklin Frazier (hereafter cited
as Frazier) (1965: 238).
3. Interviews with G. Franklin Edwards and Michael Winston; see, also, Edwards (1968: xviii).
4. See Frazier (1966: 86). This book was first published in the U.S. in 1964.
5. Quoted by Davis (1962: 435).
6. See, for example, Frazier (1923a: 437-442; 1925a: 459-464).
7. See, for example, Randolph (1922: 220-221).
8. Letter from Frazier to "Dock" Steward, January 3,1925 (Frazier Papers, Howard University).
9. See, for example, Frazier (1928a: 82-83).
10. Letter from Locke to Frazier, c. 1925 (Frazier Papers: Howard University).
11. See Frazier (1924c: 213-214); Frazier quoted in "Opinion of W.E.B. Du Bois," Crisis (June,
1924): 58-59.
12. Letter from Eileen Hood to Frazier, February 29,1928 (Frazier Papers: Howard University).
13. Frazier quoted in "Opinion of W.E.B. Du Bois," Crisis (June, 1924: 59).
14. Interview with Marie Brown Frazier. Du Bois left the country in disgust and lived the last
years of his life in Ghana. Frazier, out of respect for Du Bois and support for Kwame Nkrumah,
bequeathed his library to the University of Ghana.

REFERENCES

Cox, Oliver
1970 "Introduction" to Nathan Hare, The Black Anglo-Saxons. New York: Collier
Books: 15-31.
Cruse, Harold
1967 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: William Morrow: 154.

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Between Scorn and Longing: Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie 139

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