Researching the Origins of Art. Religion, and Mind
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Palaeoart Representation Mode: Homo ergaster/erectus appears to have created the first intentional sculptures in stone with predominately four themes: aesthetically beautiful symmetrical bifaces (so-called 'handaxes'), representations of the female as birthgiver; the human head/profile/skull; and animals of hunt and ritual. Evidence for red ochre pigment use also appears during the EP.
Early Paleolithic, that is, Acheulian, palaeoart appears to have three distinctive chronological phases. (See argument for three divisions at Olduvai Gorge in Derek Roe 'Metrical Analysis of Handaxes and Cleavers' in M.D. Leakey with D.A. Roe. [1994]. Olduvai Gorge. Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: p. 204.)....Phase I: Early Acheulian (c. 1.4 MYA to 1.0 MYA).....Phase II: Middle Acheulian (c. 1.0 MYA to 500,000 BP).....Phase III: Later Acheulian (c. 500,000 to 100,000 BP)Phase I: Early Acheulian (c. 1.4 MYA to 1.0 MYA). The oldest securely dated Acheulian "biface" is dated to 1.4 million years ago (Konso-Gardula, Ethiopia). Using examples from Peninj, West Natron, Tanzania (c. 1.4 MYA) and Olduvai Gorge, Upper Bed II (c. 1.15-1.2 MYA), Wynn [Wynn, T. (1989). The Evolution of Spatial Intelligence] has analyzed the topological and projective concepts used to fashion early handaxes, including constant interval, mirror symmetry reversal, and sense of overall shape of the artifact. I would add that the artist appears to use a 2x4-term conceptual matrix with top and bottom of object either pointed/rounded and either trimmed/natural and/or with left and right side curved either concave/convex and/or either curvilinear/rectilinear. Using this matrix all the early Acheulian tool shapes can be generated, including disks, spheroids, biface ('handaxe' and 'cleaver'), scraper, awl and cleaver. In sum, this early phase has a characteristic two-dimensional symmetry modeling that uses pairs of similar and opposite elemental shapes (or shape-gestures) for overall object shaping.I have suggested that the breakthrough to Oldowan stone tools had the capacity to function as a symbol for a corresponding breakthrough to consciousness of the human soul as 'the core sustaining essence' of the self in its relationships. (See summary of Oldowan mind and my essay on the Oldowan mind.) It appears that during the Early Acheulian this Oldowan symbolism was augmented by new symbolic values, the most prominant being: "the renewal, restoration and reparation of the core". I derive this signification by reflecting on the Acheulian process of tool-making. From a boulder (i.e., core) the knapper removed a large flake ('blank') and flaked it into a biface ('handaxe' and 'cleaver' forms). This was used as a core from which flakes were removed to be used as cutting tools, and/or the core was flaked to make a more symmetrically shaped core. In short, a flake blank taken from a core was, in its turn, flaked to create a new 'core'. In this sense, the 'core' was renewed. While at first glance trivial, this appears to have had no small religious and psychological significance. The tool-making process could signify 'the renewal of the core.' The 'renewal of the core' could have expressed psychological and spiritual renewal of the 'sustaining and nurturing core essence' (a fundamental spiritual theme derived from the earlier Oldowan symbolism). It also could re-presence, and be a token of, the reestablishing of symmetry relations among peoples, the renewal of cooperation, mutuality, and exchange. Thus, the early bifaces could have served as a vehicle for the expression of reparation, a foundational theme in interpersonal conflict healing. It could have further expressed not only aesthetic balance, but the balance and harmony of the psyche's (soul's) well-being. It would have signified 'restoration and reparation of the core essence in renewed balance and wholeness'. In this light it may be seen how even the earliest bifaces offered their makers and users a selective advantage in evolution, or at least were an expression of that advantage. (For more details on this interpretation see Harrod, J. Notes Toward an Early Acheulian Stone Tools Logic Model: Constitutive Operations and Analogies of the Soul)Phase II: Middle Acheulian (c. 1.0 MYA to 500,000 BP).. Three-dimensionally symmetric bifaces (handaxes) reflect a Euclidean, projective sense of space [Wynn, T. (1989). The Evolution of Spatial Intelligence]. This sense appears to emerge between 1 million and 600,000 years ago. Representative of this subphase are bifaces from African sites such as Olorgesailie, Kenya (c. 750,000-999,000 MYA) and Olduvai Gorge Bed IV (600,000-800,000 BP); Near Eastern sites such as Joub Jannine II (800-900,000 BP), Gesher Benot Ya'akov (780,000 BP) and Latamne (500-700,000 BP); and the European 'Abbevillian' style (c. 600,000 BP). In addition to the new 3-D sense of space, in comparison to the Early Acheulian, the Middle Acheulians appear to standardize biface manufacture to two predominant biface types, with a pair of type--lanceolate and pick or cordiform and cleaver--characterizing the Near Eastern and African traditions respectively. During this period the percentage of cleavers and bifaces in a given tool assemblage increases and there are sometimes great numbers at a single location. Weight range is variable and some bifaces are quite heavy, others tiny, seemingly beyond any utilitarian function. Microwear studies indicate that while some bifaces were used in the same way as flakes, i.e., for butchery, meat-cutting, woodworking and cutting of plants, others showed no use at all.I propose that to the Middle Acheulians used biface pairings to symbolize and presence the reparation and restoration of two kinds of core-essence conceived as gesture-movements. One was embodied and ‘sheath-like’, transformative like birthgiving and dying. It was energized through intercourse, sexual intercourse, symbolic exchange, creative intercourse, and intercourse with the living beings of the biosphere. The other was spirit and ‘vehicle-like’, an invisible force of aliveness, an animating force or spirit, the strength of which could wax or wane, mature or wither. It was the source of health and well-being. These two kinds of transcendent spiritual forces were presenced through the stone knappers artistic visualization and shaping in three-dimensional space.Residing in this new three-dimensional Euclidean space, these two energies may have been viewed as a kind of otherworldly being 'in another dimension'. One was a transcendent spirit-power, perhaps called ‘the One Who Presides Over the Processes of Birth and Death and Rebirth.’ The other was a transcendent spirit-power, perhaps called ‘the One Who Gives Us Spirit Power.’ This would have been the first visualization of ‘spiritual’ or ‘supernatural’ beings—‘spiritual’ also implying ‘abstract’ since these spirits were symbolized in geometric shaped gesture-movements. Thus, the Middle Acheulians would have been the initiators of two of the most fundamental characteristics found in every Homo sapiens sapiens religion, belief in ‘supernatural beings’ and belief in a process of death and rebirth (after Spiro and Eliade). If such revelations were encoded in bifaces over 800,000 years ago, we must radically rethink the origins of religion, mind and psyche. (For more details on this interpretation see Harrod, J. Notes on Middle Acheulian Spirituality: Stone Tool Logic Structures and Analogies of the Soul)Phase III: Later Acheulian Phase (500,000 to 100,000 BP). Around 500,000 years ago in Africa, the Near East, Europe and elsewhere, there emerges a further refinement in biface workmanship as indicated by extensive 'soft hammer' technique, increased counts of flake scars and decreased relative thickness. During this period one finds beautiful masterpieces of mirror symmetry in 3-D Euclidean projective space. Correspondingly, during the Later Acheulian the symbolic, spiritual nature of the biface is even more self-evident. For instance, at European sites there appears to be a standardization to one biface type ('handaxe') for symbolic purposes and there is convincing evidence of representational sculptures in flint and other materials. These Later Acheulian sculptures appear to have four typical symbolic themes:
a female figure symbolizing a divine 'Giver of Life' ('Birthgiver' and perhaps also 'Death-Giver', a thematic drawing upon meanings previously encoded in the Middle Acheulian Abbevillian type biface
the human head in 3-D or profile, or as a skull
animals, especially carnivore predators and herbivore prey of the hunt
the mirror symmetric, aesthetically pleasing biface (so-called 'handaxe') which appears to recapitulate significations of the Middle Acheulian pick and cleaver, i.e., 'spirit in its soaring and grounding qualities'; 'passageway to the spirit world'; and a divinity of this spirit
Such a symbol system would have been capable of symbolizing the passage between the worlds; the process of passage itself; the creative process as both symmetry-making, birthing, and the releasing of life-force; and the Way as an ultimate spiritual concept. The Later Acheulian symbol system had the capacity to articulate and promote basic shamanic healing, mortuary and rebirthing practices.The most securely dated examples of Later Acheulian figurative art are the Tan Tan (Morocco) figurine, gender indeterminate (Acheulian, 300-500,000 BP) and the Berekhat Ram (Israel) female figurine (Acheulian, 233,000-470,000 BP). In Northwestern Europe Later Acheulian sculptures that exemplify all four symbolic themes have been documented in publications of the journal Archaeologische Berichten (Elst, Netherlands) over the last decade or two, as well as in prior publications of unheralded pioneers such as Walther Matthis (Hamburg-Wittenbergen site, Hamburg, GR). The dating of the Northwest European figurines is by geological profile and tool typology.Toward the end of Phase III artists appear to combine in one object two or more of the four basic EP symbolic themes. Evidently, there is now a sophisticated consciousness of, and ability to manipulate the EP religious symbol system. An early example is the combination handaxe+fossil 'womb'+possible profile on a handaxe from Swanscombe, England (c. 400,000 BP). Examples increase in frequency over the course of Phase III and continue into the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. Typical late Phase III examples are handaxe+two possible profiles (Wolvercote, 200,000 BP); handaxe+fossil 'womb' (West Tofts, Norfolk, 100,000 BP?); and handaxe+'womb'+'head' (Cys-la-Commune, Aisne, 100,000 BP). The increasing frequency of combination art during the Later Acheulian seems to parallel the contemporaneous evolution of Middle Paleolithic art and protolanguage. Middle Paleolithic art and protolanguage utilizes combinations and aggregations of motifs.The Biface Symbol System and Evolutionary Advantage. What are the possible evolutionary benefits of the Early Paleolithic biface throughout its million and half year tradition? Since these bifaces reflect a new cognitive sense of symmetry, one of their meaning-functions could have been as symbols of symmetry and cooperation among social groups and the 'reparation of that symmetry'. The selective advantage of the handaxe would have been its symbolic power to facilitate cooperation and alliances and reduce conspecific competition and conflict. If so, it would have helped resolve the so-called "group size crisis" postulated by Aiello and Dunbar (see below). In addition, the bifacial handaxe along with red ochre use might have had a display function in sexual selection [after Kohn, M. and Mithen, S. (1999). Handaxes: products of sexual selection. Antiquity 73:518-26]. The addition of a sculptural repertoire to the biface ('handaxe') could have further augmented these benefits. For instance the female figurines may have represented a female divinity who was not only the One Who Presides Over the Passage into Life and into Death, but also an ancestral mother of 'the human family as one family' and thus a mediator of intergroup conflict. In combination with symbols of the human head, sacred animals, and the pure geometry of the biface, this female creatrix ('goddess') had the power to preside over and promote the interdependence and harmony of all living things.
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In addition to the biface symbol system, there is Early Acheulian evidence for red ochre mining and use. This appears as early as Wonderwork Cave, South Africa, 900,000-800,000 BP. Later Acheulian instances of striated or abraded (used) hematite include
Terra Amata, FR (ESR 380,000±80,000 BP) -- 77 pieces of hematite
Ambrona, Spain (300-400,000 BP) -- red siltstone, rubbed?
Hungsi, India (?300,000 BP) -- hematite pebbles, 1 striated
Achenheim, FR (250,000 BP) -- 1 hematite, rubbed
Maastricht-Belvedere, NL (285,000 BP) -- red stains in soil
Beçov, CZ (?220,000 BP) -- 1 hematite, striated, ochre powder
Pleistocene beads of ostrich eggshell (El Greifa E, c. 200,000 BP); and perforated wolf incisor (Repolusthöle, Austria, c. 300,000 BP) indicate Later Acheulian technical ability and might have been used for pendants or necklaces, which also may have had a symbolic value.The collection of exotic objects, which may have had symbolic uses, continues from the Oldowan, for example: Quartz crystals (Zhoukoudian, China; Acheulian level, Gudenus Cave, Austria; Lower Acheulian level, Singi Talav, India; Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel); scraper with echinoid cast (Saint-Just-des-Marais, France); polished wooden plank (Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel).There is also evidence for defleshing of the dead, e.g. Bodo, Ethiopia, 550-640,000 BP; Gran Dolina (TD 6), 780,000-990,000 BP. This may indicate ritual treatment of the skull or ritual cannibalism perhaps in the context of mortuary rites. Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones"), 350-500,000 BP, contains one handaxe but no other tools, possibly also evidence of mortuary ritual.Signs Representation Mode: Archaeological evidence of the first human marking ('sign') systems consist of various kinds of engraved markings on bone, including single or iterated strokes, rays or fans of strokes, forked or 'Y' strokes, and crosshatch or netlike patterns of lines. Examples include an elephantid vertebra engraved with (or with natural) fan of seven radiating lines and four undulating lines, which may have been intended as a funnel-shape (Stranská Skála 600,000-700,000 BP); seven bone, ivory, and quartzite objects variously engraved with multiple parallel, radiating, and crossed strokes, paired arcs, arcuate pattern, and crosshatching rectangular pattern with rays or chevrons and parallel strokes (Bilzingsleben 300-350,000 BP). A buried rock fragment engraved with one cupule and a long meander groove, Auditorium Cave, Bhimbetka, Acheulian, >300,000 BP. These examples suggest iterative and tactile (haptic) components of 'meaning'. At Hamburg-Wittenbergen, 200,000 BP, a handaxe is engraved with a schematic head and in the womb area nested 'chevrons' and a 'zigzag' and thus exemplifies the combination and aggregation of thematic elements in a single object that occurs in the latter part of Phase III. Possible, unconfirmed evidence for marking signs also appear in the literature on Grotte de l'Observatoire, France, Acheulian, early Riss -- a lattice of vertical line and crossing lines on a biface; Port-Launay en Ecouflant, Maine-et-Loire, France, Acheulian, early Riss -- a bone engraved with short parallel strokes.Mental Model or Template of Mind: 'Conceptual-Meaning Gesture Modeling'. During the Acheulian Early Paleolithic Period we see the first "meaning systems' encoded in symbolic 'representations' or more precisely in symbolic 'gesture-movements' which 'presenced' their meaning. Extent encodings are in stone (handaxe, sculptures, engravings of marking signs). They were probably also employed in body-painting. These meaning systems likely had both a social function and a depth psychological function. If such meaning systems indeed existed, then it follows that 'meaning' and 'reference' precede language systems. Symbolic modes appear to have included icon and metaphor, activating 'reference' and 'fetish meaning'. Cognitively speaking one could infer a mental model consisting of a neural 'symbolic memory controller' + 'external storage' [after Donald, M. (1991) Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University]. One can also infer expanded social intelligence to manage interspecific conflict and resolve the 'group size crisis' posited by Aiello and Dunbar (1993) [Aiello, L and Dunbar, R. (1993). Neocortex size, group size and the evolution of language, Current Anthropology 34:184-193]. Possibly new distributive + new artistic intelligence modules evolve [after Mithen, S. (1996) The prehistory of mind: The cognitive origins of art, religion, and science. London: Thames and Hudson]. Drawing on the Piagetian theory of child development of intelligence, Early Acheulian bifaces exhibit 'preoperations B' and Middle Acheulian bifaces (e.g., Olduvai Bed IV) exhibit early 'concrete operations' [Wynn, T. (1989). The evolution of spatial competence. Chicago: University of Illinois; Wynn T. (1996) The evolution of tools and symbolic behavior. In A. Lock and C. Peters (eds.), Handbook of human symbolic evolution. Oxford: Clarendon]. Presumably, Phase III handaxes would represent a later stage of 'concrete operations'.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Science Corner: Therapy through Creativity
A Portrait of the Artist as a Nutcase
A Perspective on the Biological Basis of Aesthetic Preferences from Neuropsychological Study of Artistic Creativity......Visual art, venerated and yet notorious for its mysterious creative beauty, has always been a nebulous topic for empirical study. Some pieces are beautiful, some hideous, but why? Where do our preferences for the aesthetic come from? Popular wisdom holds that we learn aesthetic preferences from our parents, our peers, and our surrounding culture. Some have even asserted that training is necessary to acquire aesthetic preferences (Lakoff & Scherr, 1984, as cited by Etcoff, 1999). Despite such popular assertions and beliefs, several recent studies contain evidence for the biological basis of some aesthetic preferences in visual art. Preferences for shape, symmetry, spatial orientation, and even level of abstraction and realism are being related to physiological attributes such as handedness, gender, right and left hemisphere perceptual biases and abilities. While the bulk of this literature has previously been reviewed, (Strachan, 1999), the relationship between biology and aesthetic preferences remains a dubious one in the scientific community.
our mothers and the origins or our aesthetic judgement.....
Like Frederic Leighton, John Ruskin believed in the nobility of high art and its ethical implications. This nobility derives from the work of art's ideal beauty and its abililty to elevate the viewer. Beauty, attained through the detailed examination of nature, signifies the external quality of an object/person and thus, "typical beauty", and the fulfillment of function and thus, "vital beauty". Proportion is the root of any beautiful form, and the perfected fully proportioned form translates the notion of the Beautiful to the viewer. Ruskin states, "Painting, with all its technicalities, difficulties, and particular ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing."(20)
Alland, A. 1977. The Artistic Animal: An Inquiry into the Biological Roots of Art,,,,,,"Art communicates experience that has no direct linguistic signs in spoken language." -- Alexander Alland
Bibliography of books on art and science
Creativity, Evolution and Mental Illnesses--Mental representations, or memes, transform the space in which they evolve. Their survival is dependent on the survival of the individuals and the groups hosting them. Creativity - the production of new and useful ideas - isclosely linked to the social dynamics of the individuals expressing creative ideas: without social confrontationnew memes cannot become diffuse. Creative individuals tend to be emotionally unstable, and many are affectedby mental disorders. Studies on the link between creativity and mental illnesses show that it is exactly thecharacteristics of the mental disorder which also confer some advantage on afflicted individuals. Theseadvantages extend to the groups to which the creative, mentally ill individuals belong. The group comprising themost creative personalities will therefore acquire an adaptive advantage which maintains the integrity of thegroup as a whole, in spite of the vulnerability of the individual
Creativity and Irrational Forces: Eccentric Artists and Mad Scientists
Laura Gosselink
"Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night"- Edgar Allen Poe
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein
Is creative genius somehow woven together with "madness"? According to the dictionary, "to create" is "to bring into being or form out of nothing." Such a powerful, mysterious, and seemingly impossible act must surely be beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. No wonder creativity has for so long been "explained" as the expression of an irrational, intuitive psychic "underground" teaming with forces (perhaps divine) that are unknown and unknowable (at least to the "sane," rational mind). The ancient Greeks believed creative inspiration was achieved through altered states of mind such as "divine madness."
The innocent eye: A child's "definition" of artAccording to Wollheim, children do not make art. They make pictures, drawings, paintings, collages. They are perhaps too young to be concerned with the creation of art. Yet they seem to have their own, clear "definition" of a work of art. Some years ago, when Leah was 9 years old, I was reading Wollheim's Painting as an Art. Leah looked at the picture on the cover and asked, "What is that?" "It's a work of art," I said. She started to laugh and said, "That's not a work of art, it's a painting!" "A painting is a work of art," I said. She did not agree. I had noticed this before with young children. They know perfectly well what a work of art is: In the realm of artefacts and images there are paintings, drawings, cartoons, and statues, statuettes and figurines in stone, porcelan and bronze, and works of art. "Works of art" are also made with paint or bronze or whatever, but a "work of art" is something (mostly it's 3-D and quite often it possesses a kind of beauty) which cannot be explained in utilitarian terms and which bears no relation to the visible world. It's something that's just there, made to be placed in public space or in a museum garden. It doesn't represent a little mermaid or a piglet or the queen on her horse. It simply is a "work of art".
A Perspective on the Biological Basis of Aesthetic Preferences from Neuropsychological Study of Artistic Creativity......Visual art, venerated and yet notorious for its mysterious creative beauty, has always been a nebulous topic for empirical study. Some pieces are beautiful, some hideous, but why? Where do our preferences for the aesthetic come from? Popular wisdom holds that we learn aesthetic preferences from our parents, our peers, and our surrounding culture. Some have even asserted that training is necessary to acquire aesthetic preferences (Lakoff & Scherr, 1984, as cited by Etcoff, 1999). Despite such popular assertions and beliefs, several recent studies contain evidence for the biological basis of some aesthetic preferences in visual art. Preferences for shape, symmetry, spatial orientation, and even level of abstraction and realism are being related to physiological attributes such as handedness, gender, right and left hemisphere perceptual biases and abilities. While the bulk of this literature has previously been reviewed, (Strachan, 1999), the relationship between biology and aesthetic preferences remains a dubious one in the scientific community.
our mothers and the origins or our aesthetic judgement.....
Like Frederic Leighton, John Ruskin believed in the nobility of high art and its ethical implications. This nobility derives from the work of art's ideal beauty and its abililty to elevate the viewer. Beauty, attained through the detailed examination of nature, signifies the external quality of an object/person and thus, "typical beauty", and the fulfillment of function and thus, "vital beauty". Proportion is the root of any beautiful form, and the perfected fully proportioned form translates the notion of the Beautiful to the viewer. Ruskin states, "Painting, with all its technicalities, difficulties, and particular ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing."(20)
Alland, A. 1977. The Artistic Animal: An Inquiry into the Biological Roots of Art,,,,,,"Art communicates experience that has no direct linguistic signs in spoken language." -- Alexander Alland
Bibliography of books on art and science
Creativity, Evolution and Mental Illnesses--Mental representations, or memes, transform the space in which they evolve. Their survival is dependent on the survival of the individuals and the groups hosting them. Creativity - the production of new and useful ideas - isclosely linked to the social dynamics of the individuals expressing creative ideas: without social confrontationnew memes cannot become diffuse. Creative individuals tend to be emotionally unstable, and many are affectedby mental disorders. Studies on the link between creativity and mental illnesses show that it is exactly thecharacteristics of the mental disorder which also confer some advantage on afflicted individuals. Theseadvantages extend to the groups to which the creative, mentally ill individuals belong. The group comprising themost creative personalities will therefore acquire an adaptive advantage which maintains the integrity of thegroup as a whole, in spite of the vulnerability of the individual
Creativity and Irrational Forces: Eccentric Artists and Mad Scientists
Laura Gosselink
"Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night"- Edgar Allen Poe
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein
Is creative genius somehow woven together with "madness"? According to the dictionary, "to create" is "to bring into being or form out of nothing." Such a powerful, mysterious, and seemingly impossible act must surely be beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. No wonder creativity has for so long been "explained" as the expression of an irrational, intuitive psychic "underground" teaming with forces (perhaps divine) that are unknown and unknowable (at least to the "sane," rational mind). The ancient Greeks believed creative inspiration was achieved through altered states of mind such as "divine madness."
The innocent eye: A child's "definition" of artAccording to Wollheim, children do not make art. They make pictures, drawings, paintings, collages. They are perhaps too young to be concerned with the creation of art. Yet they seem to have their own, clear "definition" of a work of art. Some years ago, when Leah was 9 years old, I was reading Wollheim's Painting as an Art. Leah looked at the picture on the cover and asked, "What is that?" "It's a work of art," I said. She started to laugh and said, "That's not a work of art, it's a painting!" "A painting is a work of art," I said. She did not agree. I had noticed this before with young children. They know perfectly well what a work of art is: In the realm of artefacts and images there are paintings, drawings, cartoons, and statues, statuettes and figurines in stone, porcelan and bronze, and works of art. "Works of art" are also made with paint or bronze or whatever, but a "work of art" is something (mostly it's 3-D and quite often it possesses a kind of beauty) which cannot be explained in utilitarian terms and which bears no relation to the visible world. It's something that's just there, made to be placed in public space or in a museum garden. It doesn't represent a little mermaid or a piglet or the queen on her horse. It simply is a "work of art".
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Black History Time Capsule***Julian F. Abele, Architect
Julian F. Abele, Architect
Julian Francis Abele, the first African American graduate of the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, received scant recognition during his lifetime despite his many significant contributions. Although Fiske Kimball, a noted architectural historian and the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, acknowledged that Abele was "certainly one of the most sensitive designers anywhere in America" in 1942, the pioneering African American architect remained virtually unknown outside Philadelphia's architectural community until the 1970s and 1980s. Today we appreciate Abele as one of the early twentieth-century's most adept designers of revival buildings, who rejuvenated many long-dormant styles as vital, modern forms of architectural expression.
Born in Philadelphia in 1881, Abele lived most of his life in the city. He resided at 718 South Twenty-first Street and 1911 Fitzwater Street before moving to 1515 Christian Street, his home for several decades. As a boy, he attended the Institute for Colored Youth and Brown Preparatory School. An accomplished student, at his commencement from the Institute for Colored Youth he delivered a speech entitled "The Role of Art in Negro Life" and was awarded a $15 prize for being the best student in mathematics. In 1898, he attended the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, the progenitor of both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of the Arts. A student in the evening class at the school, Abele won the Graff Prize for Architectural Design at his commencement.
That same year, he enrolled in the prestigious architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. Completing his B.S. degree in 1902, Abele was the first African American to graduate from the university's architecture program. Nicknamed "Willing and Able" during his college days, he excelled, winning several impressive awards and serving as the president of the university's Architectural Society during his senior year. His first executed designs, dating to 1901, included a commemorate tablet for the University of Pennsylvania and a memorial gateway for Haverford College.
After his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, Abele augmented his education, studying architectural design at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts during the 1902-1903 academic year. While still a student, Abele, who was listed in the Philadelphia city directory as an architect as early as 1901, worked in the evenings for the noted Philadelphia architect Louis C. Hickman. During the first years of the century, Abele displayed his architectural designs at major exhibitions including those at the T Square Club in Philadelphia, the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, the Toronto Architectural Club, and the Architectural League of New York. After leaving the Hickman architectural office in 1903, he traveled extensively. During this period, he designed a house in Spokane, Washington for his sister Elizabeth Rebecca Abele Cook, who had married John F. Cook, II in Washington, D.C. and then moved west. In 1904 and 1905, Abele listed his address as Bonners Ferry, Idaho, where Cook served as the Postmaster General.Student drawings from this period:
During the middle of the decade, Abele traveled to Europe, where he experienced firsthand the architecture of eighteenth-century France, which he would favor throughout his career. Many report that Abele studied architecture while in Paris during this period. For example, Helena Fenessey, the stepdaughter of Horace Trumbauer, the architect for whom Abele worked for more than three decades, recounted that her stepfather sent Abele, the "brilliant young architectural student … to study at the Sorbonne in Europe." On the other hand, Abele's family members report that Trumbauer funded Abele's study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the most renowned architecture school in the world at the time. Contradicting these reports, researchers have discovered no evidence of Abele's matriculation in any formal program in Paris. It is possible, though, given the structure of the Ecole, that he informally attended one of the many ateliers associated with the prestigious institution.
After three years of travel and discovery, Abele returned to Philadelphia, where, excepting short trips to Europe and elsewhere, he would remain until his death in 1950. In 1906, Horace Trumbauer recruited the accomplished young architect to work at his prestigious Philadelphia architectural firm, which was known for its elegant homes for America's elite. In the mid 1880s, at 16 years of age, Trumbauer entered the architecture profession as an apprentice at G. W. and W. D. Hewitt's firm in Philadelphia. In 1890, he set out on his own. Soon afterward, he landed his first significant commission, "Grey Towers" (now Arcadia College), a castle-like mansion in Glenside, Pennsylvania for sugar baron William Welsh Harrison. Within a few years, Trumbauer's firm was flourishing. Until the stock market crashed in 1929, Trumbauer enjoyed what his stepdaughter called "the big money years." In the late winter of 1906, when Abele entered Trumbauer's organization, the firm was booming, designing not only mansions for the rich in Philadelphia, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island, but also apartment houses and other large structures. Over the next decades, Trumbauer and his staff would add office and school buildings, theaters, hospitals, clubhouses, churches, libraries, museums, and other building types to their ever-expanding repertoire.
Within a year of joining Trumbauer in 1906, Abele, who served as chief designer Frank Seeburger's assistant, had proved himself a valued member of the firm. In 1907, when Warren Powers Laird, the head of the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, asked if Trumbauer would release Abele from his contract to take a job in California, the architect curtly replied: "I, of course,would not want to lose Mr. Abele." In 1909, Seeburger, Trumbauer's chief designer, left the firm, first to practice on his own and then to form a longstanding partnership with architect Charles Rabenold. Following Seeburger's departure, Abele, who was remembered by friends as "slight, always immaculately dressed, with a well trimmed mustache," ascended to the firm's top position, chief designer, a remarkable accomplishment in light of his age and race.
In his private life, Abele was a quiet, serious man. Friends and family reported that he was a "firm Republican" and was religious but did not go to church. He married Marguerite Bulle, a French woman, and had two children, a son Julian Jr. and daughter Nadia. After several years, the marriage dissolved and the couple parted, but they never divorced. From his youth, Abele appreciated all things French and, as an adult, became a connoisseur of wine. He also enjoyed classical music and opera and frequented the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. A sports fan, he held season tickets to the University of Pennsylvania football games, which he attended with Louis Magaziner and his son Henry. He dressed smartly and, as a friend noted, even while on vacation at the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey "always wore his suit to the boardwalk. He always looked very debonair." At home, he practiced many arts and crafts including watercolor painting, lithography, etching, sketching, and jewelry and furniture making. A dedicated Francophile, he decorated his home at 1515 Christian Street in an elegant French style.
During the three decades from 1909 to 1938, while serving as Trumbauer's chief designer, Abele honed his sophisticated style on the designs for dozens of important residential, civic, and commercial landmarks including the Central library building of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Noting his importance to the firm, Trumbauer's stepdaughter remembered that Abele "became invaluable in consultation" with her father. Fiske Kimball, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was designed by Trumbauer's firm in collaboration with Zantzinger, Borie & Medary, appreciated Abele as Trumbauer's "right-hand man and designer." Collaborating closely with his employer, the "brilliant and witty" Abele once stated that the "lines are all Mr. Trumbauer's, but the shadows are all mine." Although, as Valentine Burkhart Lee, an architect on the Trumbauer staff, reported, Abele's "race was never discussed or thought about in the firm," the talented designer did in fact remain in the shadows outside the firm. Beyond the walls of the Trumbauer office, the gifted African American architect was little known due to his race. One must wonder why he was not elected to the American Institute of Architects until 1942, even though he had been an acclaimed designer for nearly four decades. After Trumbauer's death in 1938, Abele signed his own designs for the first time in his professional life, but never received the credit he deserved for his numerous noteworthy projects. At his death in 1950, few knew that architect Julian F. Abele had forever changed Philadelphia's skyline and, more generally, American architecture.
Julian Francis Abele, the first African American graduate of the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, received scant recognition during his lifetime despite his many significant contributions. Although Fiske Kimball, a noted architectural historian and the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, acknowledged that Abele was "certainly one of the most sensitive designers anywhere in America" in 1942, the pioneering African American architect remained virtually unknown outside Philadelphia's architectural community until the 1970s and 1980s. Today we appreciate Abele as one of the early twentieth-century's most adept designers of revival buildings, who rejuvenated many long-dormant styles as vital, modern forms of architectural expression.
Born in Philadelphia in 1881, Abele lived most of his life in the city. He resided at 718 South Twenty-first Street and 1911 Fitzwater Street before moving to 1515 Christian Street, his home for several decades. As a boy, he attended the Institute for Colored Youth and Brown Preparatory School. An accomplished student, at his commencement from the Institute for Colored Youth he delivered a speech entitled "The Role of Art in Negro Life" and was awarded a $15 prize for being the best student in mathematics. In 1898, he attended the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, the progenitor of both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of the Arts. A student in the evening class at the school, Abele won the Graff Prize for Architectural Design at his commencement.
That same year, he enrolled in the prestigious architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. Completing his B.S. degree in 1902, Abele was the first African American to graduate from the university's architecture program. Nicknamed "Willing and Able" during his college days, he excelled, winning several impressive awards and serving as the president of the university's Architectural Society during his senior year. His first executed designs, dating to 1901, included a commemorate tablet for the University of Pennsylvania and a memorial gateway for Haverford College.
After his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, Abele augmented his education, studying architectural design at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts during the 1902-1903 academic year. While still a student, Abele, who was listed in the Philadelphia city directory as an architect as early as 1901, worked in the evenings for the noted Philadelphia architect Louis C. Hickman. During the first years of the century, Abele displayed his architectural designs at major exhibitions including those at the T Square Club in Philadelphia, the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, the Toronto Architectural Club, and the Architectural League of New York. After leaving the Hickman architectural office in 1903, he traveled extensively. During this period, he designed a house in Spokane, Washington for his sister Elizabeth Rebecca Abele Cook, who had married John F. Cook, II in Washington, D.C. and then moved west. In 1904 and 1905, Abele listed his address as Bonners Ferry, Idaho, where Cook served as the Postmaster General.Student drawings from this period:
During the middle of the decade, Abele traveled to Europe, where he experienced firsthand the architecture of eighteenth-century France, which he would favor throughout his career. Many report that Abele studied architecture while in Paris during this period. For example, Helena Fenessey, the stepdaughter of Horace Trumbauer, the architect for whom Abele worked for more than three decades, recounted that her stepfather sent Abele, the "brilliant young architectural student … to study at the Sorbonne in Europe." On the other hand, Abele's family members report that Trumbauer funded Abele's study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the most renowned architecture school in the world at the time. Contradicting these reports, researchers have discovered no evidence of Abele's matriculation in any formal program in Paris. It is possible, though, given the structure of the Ecole, that he informally attended one of the many ateliers associated with the prestigious institution.
After three years of travel and discovery, Abele returned to Philadelphia, where, excepting short trips to Europe and elsewhere, he would remain until his death in 1950. In 1906, Horace Trumbauer recruited the accomplished young architect to work at his prestigious Philadelphia architectural firm, which was known for its elegant homes for America's elite. In the mid 1880s, at 16 years of age, Trumbauer entered the architecture profession as an apprentice at G. W. and W. D. Hewitt's firm in Philadelphia. In 1890, he set out on his own. Soon afterward, he landed his first significant commission, "Grey Towers" (now Arcadia College), a castle-like mansion in Glenside, Pennsylvania for sugar baron William Welsh Harrison. Within a few years, Trumbauer's firm was flourishing. Until the stock market crashed in 1929, Trumbauer enjoyed what his stepdaughter called "the big money years." In the late winter of 1906, when Abele entered Trumbauer's organization, the firm was booming, designing not only mansions for the rich in Philadelphia, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island, but also apartment houses and other large structures. Over the next decades, Trumbauer and his staff would add office and school buildings, theaters, hospitals, clubhouses, churches, libraries, museums, and other building types to their ever-expanding repertoire.
Within a year of joining Trumbauer in 1906, Abele, who served as chief designer Frank Seeburger's assistant, had proved himself a valued member of the firm. In 1907, when Warren Powers Laird, the head of the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, asked if Trumbauer would release Abele from his contract to take a job in California, the architect curtly replied: "I, of course,would not want to lose Mr. Abele." In 1909, Seeburger, Trumbauer's chief designer, left the firm, first to practice on his own and then to form a longstanding partnership with architect Charles Rabenold. Following Seeburger's departure, Abele, who was remembered by friends as "slight, always immaculately dressed, with a well trimmed mustache," ascended to the firm's top position, chief designer, a remarkable accomplishment in light of his age and race.
In his private life, Abele was a quiet, serious man. Friends and family reported that he was a "firm Republican" and was religious but did not go to church. He married Marguerite Bulle, a French woman, and had two children, a son Julian Jr. and daughter Nadia. After several years, the marriage dissolved and the couple parted, but they never divorced. From his youth, Abele appreciated all things French and, as an adult, became a connoisseur of wine. He also enjoyed classical music and opera and frequented the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. A sports fan, he held season tickets to the University of Pennsylvania football games, which he attended with Louis Magaziner and his son Henry. He dressed smartly and, as a friend noted, even while on vacation at the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey "always wore his suit to the boardwalk. He always looked very debonair." At home, he practiced many arts and crafts including watercolor painting, lithography, etching, sketching, and jewelry and furniture making. A dedicated Francophile, he decorated his home at 1515 Christian Street in an elegant French style.
During the three decades from 1909 to 1938, while serving as Trumbauer's chief designer, Abele honed his sophisticated style on the designs for dozens of important residential, civic, and commercial landmarks including the Central library building of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Noting his importance to the firm, Trumbauer's stepdaughter remembered that Abele "became invaluable in consultation" with her father. Fiske Kimball, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was designed by Trumbauer's firm in collaboration with Zantzinger, Borie & Medary, appreciated Abele as Trumbauer's "right-hand man and designer." Collaborating closely with his employer, the "brilliant and witty" Abele once stated that the "lines are all Mr. Trumbauer's, but the shadows are all mine." Although, as Valentine Burkhart Lee, an architect on the Trumbauer staff, reported, Abele's "race was never discussed or thought about in the firm," the talented designer did in fact remain in the shadows outside the firm. Beyond the walls of the Trumbauer office, the gifted African American architect was little known due to his race. One must wonder why he was not elected to the American Institute of Architects until 1942, even though he had been an acclaimed designer for nearly four decades. After Trumbauer's death in 1938, Abele signed his own designs for the first time in his professional life, but never received the credit he deserved for his numerous noteworthy projects. At his death in 1950, few knew that architect Julian F. Abele had forever changed Philadelphia's skyline and, more generally, American architecture.
Black History Time capsule--E.Franklin Frazier socialogist, educator, author scholar
E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER 1894-1962Sociologist, Educator, Author, ScholarA Bio-Bibliography
Table of Contents
IntroductionWorks by E. Franklin Frazier Books Book Chapters Essays & Journal Articles Papers Works He EditedWorks About E. Franklin Frazier Biographical Evaluations and CommentariesOther Sources
INTRODUCTION
Edward Franklin Frazier was born September 24, 1894 in Baltimore, Maryland. Upon his graduation from Colored High School, Baltimore (June 1912), he was awarded, the School's annual scholarship to Howard University. He was an excellent scholar, pursuing Latin, Greek, German and mathematics, who found time to participate in extracurricular activities involving drama, political science, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. His leadership skills were evidenced in his class presidencies of 1915 and 1916.
On graduation from Howard in 1916, Frazier began a teaching career, experiencing high schools in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia and Maryland. During this time he published an anti-war pamphlet entitled God and War. In 1919 he accepted a fellowship to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts to pursue graduate study, and on completion of his thesis "New Currents of Thought among the Colored People of America" graduated with a Master's degree in sociology in 1920.
In 1920 Frazier became a research fellow at the New York School of Social Work. From 1921 to 1922, he traveled to Denmark on an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship, and on his return, he accepted a position at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia. The Morehouse position allowed him to combine the teaching of sociology with the direction of the Atlanta School of Social Work. It was during his Morehouse tenure that Frazier began his writings on the Negro family. His controversial publication "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" in Forum (June 1927) forced him to leave Morehouse.
He later received a fellowship from the University of Chicago and began pursuit of a doctoral program in 1927. According to G. Franklin Edwards in his "Introduction" to E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations (1968), it was during his study at Chicago where he received his doctoral degree in sociology in 1931, that "Frazier became thoroughly socialized into what later came to be called the 'Chicago School of Sociology'." His doctoral dissertation was later published as The Negro Family in Chicago.
Frazier taught at Fisk University 1929-1931 while a doctoral student at the University of Chicago working on his dissertation, and he continued at Fisk beyond that date until 1934 when he assumed the directorship of Howard University's Department of Sociology. He remained an active Director of the Department until 1959, after which he became Professor Emeritus of the Department of Sociology and the African Studies Program. Frazier was elected President of the American Sociological Association in 1948 and received the Association's MacIver Award for his contributions in the field of sociology.
Frazier was a prolific writer, producing some nine books (published in varying translations and editions) and over one hundred articles and essays. Anthony M. Platt in his article "Racism in Academia" published in the Monthly Review (September 1990) writes "His [Frazier] 1949 textbook The Negro in the United States was the first of its kind, a challenge to conventional 'social problems' texts... His ... Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World, for example was on the cutting edge of progressive scholarship with its effort to understand the political economy of racism in a global context. His Black Bourgeoisie (1957)...was a savage demystification of the 'myth of Negro business'." A significant work, Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States (1940) attempts to construct profiles of Negro youth and analyze socialization influences in the cities of Washington , D.C., and Louisville, Kentucky.
Between 1951 and 1953, he served with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), traveling to Paris, Africa and the Middle East. During this period, he continued his writing, focusing on the struggle of people of Africa and African descent to achieve equality, and on religion. His last book The Negro Church in America was published posthumously in 1964.
Frazier died on May 17, 1962. He has been ranked among the top African Americans for his influence of institutions and practices to accept the demands by African Americans for economic, political and social equality in American life. It is for his work and for his contributions to Howard University that the Howard University School of Social Work has created in his honor the E. Franklin Frazier Research Center (official inauguration May 24, 2000).
In the bibliography which follows, attempt has been made to include all titles published by Frazier, but not the varying translations and/or editions and reprints which may exist. The works about Frazier are necessarily selected. Within the given headings, arrangement of the publications is alphabetical by title. For the convenience of persons who may use this as a working bibliography, call numbers indicating location of the items in the Howard University Libraries System (Divinity, Founders, Social Work, Auxiliary Collection) and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) have been provided. Reproductions of many of Frazier's essays and journal articles are available in The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
Researched and Compiled by Audrey Thompson, Acting Librarian, Social Work Library,Howard University Libraries.May 24, 2000.
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WORKS BY E. FRANKLIN FRAZIERBooks
Frazier, E[dward] Franklin.
The Black Bourgeoisie. New York: Free Press Paperbacks published by Simon & Schuster, 1997. (UGL Circulation, E185.86 .F72813 1997 Auxiliary Coll.).
Black Bourgeoisie: the Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States. New York: Collier Books [1979, c1957]. (Social Work E185.61 F833 1979).
Bourgeoisie Noir. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1955,1969. (MSRC M323 F86 b2).
E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations: Selected Papers, ed. with an Introduction by G. Franklin Edwards. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968.( Founders E185 F835 1968).
The Free Negro family : a study of family origins before the civil war. Nashville: Fisk University Press, 1932. (Social Work E185 F83).
God and War. [n.p.], [n.d.]. (MSRC M231 F869)
The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken Books, 1966, c1963. (Founders BR563 N4 F7 1966B).
The Negro Family in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1932].(MSRC M321.1 F86ne).
The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.(Founders E185.86 .F74 ; Divinity E185.86 .F74).
Negro Freedmen. New York: Arno Press, 1968.
The Negro in the United States. New York: Macmillan Co., 1949. (Divinity E185 F833).
Negro Youth at the Crossways, Their Personality Development in the Middle States. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1940. (Divinity E185.6 .F74).
Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, [1965]. (Founders HT1521 F68 1965).
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Book Chapters
"Black Bourgeoisie: Public and Academic Reactions." in Reflections on Community Studies. Ed. A.L. Vidich, et. al. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1964. 305-311, 349.
"La Bourgeoisie Noire." in Anthology of American Negro Literature, by V.F. Calverton. New York: The Modern Library, 1929. 379-88.
"La Bourgeoisie Noire." in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader .New York : Viking, 1994. 173-181. (MSRC M810.8 P828 1994).
"Commentary on "The Impact of Western Education on the African's Way of Life." in Africa Today. Ed. C. Grove Haines. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1955. 166-71. (Founders DT5 H25).
"The Cultural Background of Southern Negroes." in Selected Papers of the Institute on Cultural Patterns of Newcomers, Welfare Council of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, October 1957.1-14.
"Desegregation as an Object of Sociological Research." in Human Behavior and Social processes: An Interactionist Approach. Ed. Arnold Rose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961. 698-24. (Founders HM131 R78).
"Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class." in The New Negro, by Alain Locke. New York: A. and C. Boni Company, 1925. 333-40. (Founders NX512.3.N5 L6 1970).
"The Garvey Movement" in The Making of Black America, by August Meier. New York: Atheneum, 1969. 204-208. (Founders; Divinity E185 M43).
"Impact of Colonialism on African Social Forms and Personality." in Publication of Norman Harris Memorial Foundation Lectures on Africa in the Modern World. Ed. Calvin W. Stillman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. 70-96.
"Introduction" in Caribbean Studies: A Symposium. Ed. Vera Rubin. Jamaica, B.W.I.: University College of the West Indies, 1957. v-viii (MSRC M972.9 R82).
"The Negro and Racial Conflicts." in One America. Ed. Francis J. Brown and Joseph S. Roucek. New York: Prentice Hall, 1952. 492-504.
"The Negro Family." in The Family: Its Function and Destiny. Ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen. New York: Harper and Bros., 1948. 142-58. (Founders HQ728 A74).
"Negro Harlem: An Ecological Study." in Studies in Human Ecology. Ed. George A. Theodorson. Evanston, Ill: Row, Peterson and Company, 1961. 165-74. (Founders HM206 T48 1961B).
"The Negro in the United States." in Race relations in World Perspective. Ed. Andrew W. Lind. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1955, pp.339-70.
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"The Negro Now." Contact, Book 2: Britain Between West and East (1946). 61-63.
"Negro, Sex Life of the African and American." in The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1961. 769-75. (Founders HQ9 E4).
"Post High School Education of Negroes in New York State." chap. 8 in Inequality of Opportunity in Higher Education, a study of Minority Group and Related Barriers to College Admission, published in A Report to the Temporary Commission on the Need for a State University, by David S. Kerkowitz. Albany: William Press, 1948. 159-74.
"Potential American Negro Contributions to African Social Development." in Africa: Seen by American Negroes, Presence Africaine. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1959. 263-78. ( Founders DT14 A35).
"Problemes de L'Etudiant Noir aux Etats-Unis." in Les Etudiants Noirs Parlent. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1952. 275-83.
"The Racial Issue." in Unity and Difference in American Life. Ed. R.M. MacIver. New York: Harper and Bros., 1947. 43-59.
"Racial Problems in World Society." in Race Relations and Theory: Essays in Honor of Robert E. Park. Ed. Jitsuichi Masuoka and Preston Valien. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961. 38-50.
"Review of Myrdal's 'An American Dilemma'." in Sociology of Race Relations. N.Y.: Free Press, c1980. 159-162. ( Founders HT1521 S546).
"The Socialization of the Negro Child in the Border and Southern States." in A Casebook. Ed. Yehudi A. Cohan. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1961. 45-53.
"Sociologic Factors in the Formation of Sex Attitudes." in Psychosexual Development in Health and Disease. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1949. 244-55.
"Supplementary Studies" in Inequality of opportunity in higher education; a study of minority group and related barriers to college admission: a report to the Temporary Commission on the Need for a State University, by David S. Berkowitz. Albany: Williams Press, 1948.
"Traditions and Patterns of Negro Family Life." in Race and Culture Contacts. Ed. Edward B. Reuter. . New York: McGraw-Hill Company 1934. 191-207. (Founders HT1521 A5).
"A World Community and a Universal Moral Order." in Approaches to Group Understanding, for Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relations to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc. Ed. Lymon Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, and R. M. MacIver. New York: Harper and Bros., 1947. 443-52. (Founders HM101 C678 1945).
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Essays and Journal Articles
"All God's Chillun Got Eyes." Crisis 29 (April, 1925) :254.
"The American Negro's New Leaders." Current History 28 (April, 1928) :56-59.
"An Analysis of Statistics on Negro Illegitimacy in the United States." Social Forces 9 (December, 1932) :249-57.
"Areas of Research in Race Relations." Sociology and Social Research 42 (July-August, 1958) :424-29.
"The Booker T. Washington Papers." The Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 2 (February, 1945) :23-31.
"La Bourgeosie Noire." The Modern Quarterly 5 (1928-30) :78-84.
"Brazil Has No Race Problems." Common Sense 11 (November, 1942) :363-65.
"Certain Aspects of Conflict in the Negro Family." Social Forces 10 (October, 1931) :76-84.
"The Changing Status of the Negro Family." Social Forces 9 (March, 1931) :386-93.
"Chicago, a Cross Section of Negro Life." Opportunity 7 (March, 1929) :70-73.
"Children and Income in Negro Families." (with Eleanor Bernert). Social Forces 25 (December, 1946) :178-82.
"Children in Black and Mulatto Families." The American Journal of Sociology 39 (July, 1933) :12-29.
"A Community School." Southern Workman 54 (October, 1925) :495-64.
"Comparison of Negro-White Relations in Brazil and in the United States." Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series 2, 6, 7, (May, 1944) :251-269.
"Cooperation and the Negro." Crisis 5 (March, 1923) :228-29.
"The Cooperative Movement in Denmark." Southern Workman 52 (September, 1923) :479-84.
"Cooperatives: the Next Step in the Negro's Development." Southern Workman 53 (November, 1924) :505-9.
"A Critical Summary of Articles Contributed to Symposium on Negro Education." The Journal of Negro Education 5 (July, 1936) :531-33.
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"Danish People's High Schools and America." Southern Workman 9 (September, 1922) :425-30.
"Discussion." (Health Conditions in the South). Opportunity 2 (August, 1924) :259.
"The Dubois Program in the Present Crisis." Race 1, no. 1 (Winter, 1935-36) :11-13.
"Ethnic and Minority Groups in Wartime with Special Reference to the Negro." The American Journal of Sociology 48 (November, 1942) :369-77.
"Ethnic Family Patterns: The Negro in the United States." American Journal of Sociology 53 (May, 1948) :435-38.
"The Failure of the Negro Intellectual." Negro Digest (February, 1962) :26-36.
"Family Disorganization among Negroes." Opportunity 9 (1931) :204-207.
"Family Life of the Negro in the Small Town." Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work (1926), pp. 384-388.
"Folk Culture in the Making." Southern Workman 57 (1928) :195-99.
"The Folk High School at Roskilde." Southern Workman 51 (July, 1922) :325-28l.
"Frazier Urges Public Campaign to Implement Court Decisions." Teachers' Bulletin 1 (1950) :3.
"Garvey: a Mass Leader." [New York], 128 (August, 126) 147-48.
"The Garvey Movement." Opportunity 4 (November, 1926) :346-48.
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"Graduate Education in Negro Colleges and Universities." The Journal of Negro Education 2 (July, 1933) :329-41.
"How Present Day Problems of Social Life Affect the Negro." Hospital Social Service 13 (1926) :384-93.
"The Impact of Urban Civilization upon Negro Family Life." American Sociological Review 2 (August, 1937) :609-18.
"Is the Negro Family a Unique Sociological Unit?" Opportunity 5 (June, 1927) :165-8.
"King Cotton." Opportunity (February, 1926) :50-55.
"The Mind of the American Negro." Opportunity 6 (September, 1928) :263-66, 284.
"The Negro and Birth Control." Birth Control Review (March, 1933) :68-70.
"The Negro and Non-resistance." Crisis 27 (March, 1924) :213-14.
"The Negro Community, a Cultural Phenomenon." Social Forces 7 (March, 1929) :415-420.
"The Negro Family." The Annals of the American Acdemy of Political and Social Science 130 (November, 1928) :21-25.
"The Negro Family and Negro Youth." The Journal of Negro Education 9 (July, 1940) :290-299.
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"The Negro Family in Bahia, Brazil." American Sociological Review 7 (August, 1942) :465-78.
"Negro Harlem: an Ecological Study." American Journal of Sociology 43 (July, 1937) :72-88.
"Negro in the Industrial South." Nation 75 (July, 1927) :83-84.
"A Negro Industrial Group." Howard Review 1 (June, 1924) :196-211.
"A Negro looks at the Soviet Union." Proceedings of the Nationalities Panel, The Soviet Union, A Family of Nations in the War. National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, New York, N.Y. November 1943.
"The Negro Middle Class and Desegregation. " Social Problems 4 (April, 1957 ) :291-301.
"The Negro Slave Family." The Journal of Negro History 15 (April,1930) :198-206.
"Neighborhood Union in Atlanta." Southern Workman 52 (September, 1923) :437-42.
"A Note on Negro Education." Opportunity 2 (March, 1924) :75-77.
"Occupational Classes Among Negroes in Cities." The American Journal of Sociology 35 (March, 1930) :718-38.
"The Occupational Differentiation of the Negro in Cities." Southern Workman 57 (May, 1930) :196-200.
"The Pathology of Race Prejudice." Forum 70 (June, 1927) :856-62.
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"The Present Status of the Negro in the American Social Order." The Journal of Negro Education 8 (July, 1939) :376-82.
"Problems and Needs of Negro Children and Youth Resulting from Family Disorganization." The Journal of Negro Education 19 (1950) 269-77.
"Professional Education for Negro Social Workers." Hospital Social Service 18 (1928) :167-76.
"Psychological Factors in Negro Health." Social Forces 3 (March, 1925) :488-90.
"Race: an American Dilemma." Crisis 51 (April 1944) :105-6.
"Race Contacts and the Social Structure." American Sociological Review 14 (February, 1949) :1-11.
"Race Relations in World Perspective." Sociology and Social Research 41 (May-June, 1957) :331-35.
"Rejoinder to Melville J. Herskovits' 'The Negro in Bahia, Brazil: A Problem in Method'." American Sociological Review 8 (August, 1943) :402-404
"Role of Negro Schools in the Post-War World." The Journal of Negro Education 13 (Fall, 1944) :464-73.
"The Role of the Negro in Race Relations in the South." Social Forces 19 (December, 1940) :252-258.
"Significant Study of Urban Negro Life." Crisis 53 (Jan 1946) :25-27.
"Social Equality and the Negro." Opportunity (Journal of Negro of Life) 3 (June,1925) :165-168.
"The Social Status of the Negro." Les Etudes Americaines, 1948.
"Social Work in Race Relations." Crisis 27 (April, 1924) :252-254.
"Sociological Aspects of Race Relations." Courier ( August-September, 1953) :1.
"Sociological Theory and Race Relations."American Sociological Review 12 (June, 1947) :265-71.
"Some Aspects of Family Disorganization among Negros." Opportunity 9 (July, 1931) :204-7.
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"Some Aspects of Negro Business." Opportunity 2 (October, 1924) :293-97.
"Some Aspects of Race Relations in Brazil." Phylon, (Third Quarter,1942) :284-95.
"Some Effects of the Depression on the Negro in Northern Cities." Science and Society 2 (Fall, 1938) :489-99.
"The Status of the Negro in the American Social Order." The Journal of Negro Education 4 (July, 1935) :293-307.
"Theoretical Structure of Sociology and Sociological Research." The British Journal of Sociology 4 (December, 1953) :293-211.
"Three Scourges of the Negro Family." Opportunity 4 (July, 1926) :210-1, 234.
"Training Colored Social Workers in the South." Journal of Social Forces 1 (May, 1923) :440-46.
"Urbanization and its Effects upon the Task of Nation-Building in Africa South of Sahara." The Journal of Negro Education 30 (Summer, 1961) :214-22.
"Urbanization and Social Change in Africa." Sais Review 3 (Winter, 1959) :3-9.
"What is Social Equality." (with John Haynes). The World Tomorrow 9 (April, 1926) :113-14.
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Papers
"Certain Aspects of Conflict in the Negro Family." Publication of the American Sociological Society. Papers. v. 25: 212, May 1931. (MSRC M304 Am3a).
"Crisis in the Education of the Negro." Southside Conference on Discrimination in Higher Education, New Orleans, 1951. 11-22.
"Education and the African Elite." Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology, vol. 5. Changes in Education. Amsterdam: 1956. 90-96.
"The Negro in the United States." Conference on Race Relations in World Perspective. Honolulu, 1954. 339-70.
"The New Negro Middle Class." in The New Negro Thirty Years Afterward, papers contributed to the Sixteenth Annual Spring Conference of the Division of Social Science, Howard University Graduate School. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1955. 25-32. (Founders E185.5 H73 1955A)
Papers, 1908-1972. (Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, D.C.)
"The Present State of Sociological Knowledge concerning Race Relations." in Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology. Milan and Stressa, 1959. 73-80.
"Race Relations in the Caribbean." in The Economic Future of the Caribbean, papers contributed to the Seventh Annual Conference of the Division of the Social Sciences, Howard University Graduate School. Ed. Eric Williams and E. Franklin Frazier. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1944. 27-31.
"Social Trends of Significance for Adult Education" in Proceedings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Land Grant Colleges, November 13-15, 1939, Metropolotian Community Center, Chicago, Illinois.
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Works He EditedConference of Negro Land-Grant Colleges for Coordinating a Program of Cooperative Social Studies (4th : 1948 : Howard University). Report. Washington,D.C. : Howard University Press, 1949. (Founders E185.5 .A82 1948)
The Integration of the Negro into American Society; papers contributed to the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Division of the Social Sciences, May 3 and 4, 1951. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press for the Graduate School, Howard University, 1951. (Founders E184.5 .H68 1951)
SELECTED WORKS ABOUT E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER
Biographical American National Biography. v. 8. New York, Oxford University Press, c1999. 420-421.
The Black 100: a Ranking of the Most Influential African-Americans, Past and Present, revised and updated by Columbus Salley. "A Citadel Press Book" c 1993, 1994, 1999. 143-45. (Founders Ref. E185.96 .S225 1999).
Contemporary Black Biography. v.10, Detroit: Gale Research Inc., c 1996. 63-67. (Founders Ref. E185.96 .C66).
Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.(Founders Ref. CT103 .E56 1997).Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston: Beacon Press, [1962]. (UGL, Core Collection E492.94 33D H5 1962).
Notable Black American Men. Detroit : Gale Research, 1998. 428-31 (Founders Ref. HDV6316).
"Obituary." New York Times, May 22, 1962. L+, 37.
"Obituary." Washington Post. May 18, 1962. C4.
Platt, Anthony M. "The Rebellious Teaching Career of E. Franklin Frazier." Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 13 (Autumn, 1996) :86-90.
Young, James O. Black Writers of the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. (Founders Ref. PS153 N5 Y6 1973A).
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Evaluation of, and Commentary on his Writings
Cayton, Horace R. "E. Franklin Frazier: a Tribute and Review." Review of Religious Research 5 (1964) :137-142.
Henry, Charles P. "Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche: The Howard School of Thought on the Problem of Race." National Political Science Review 5 (1995) :36-56.
Jackson, Walter. "Between Socialism and Nationalism: The Young E. Franklin Frasier." Reconstruction 1, no.3 (1991) :124.
Kilson, Martin. "The Black Bourgeoisie Revisited: From E. Franklin Frazier to the Present." Dissent 30, no. 1 (130) (Winter, 1983) :85-96.
Landry, Bart. "A Reinterpretation of the Writings of Frazier on the Black Middle Class." Social Problems 26, no.2 (December 1978) :211-22.
Odum, Howard W. American Sociology: the Story of Sociology in the United States through 1950 .New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951, p.238.
Platt, Anthony M. "Between Scorn and Longing: Frazier's 'Black Bourgeoisie'." Social Justice 20, no.1-2 (Spring-Summer 1993) : 129-140.
Platt, Anthony M.E. (Tony). "E. Franklin Frazier and Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Setting the Record Straight." Contemporary-Crises 11, no.3 (1987) :265-277.
Platt, Anthony M. E. Franklin Frazier reconsidered . New Brunswick [N.J] : Rutgers University Press, [c1991]. (Founders HM22.U6 F736 1991).
Platt, Anthony M. "Racism in Academia: Lessons from the Life of E. Franklin Frazier." Monthly Review 42, no.4 (September 1990) : 29-46.
Platt, Anthony M. and Chandler, Susan. "Constant Struggle: E. Franklin Frazier and Black Social Work in the 1920's." Social Work 33, no. 4 (July-August, 1988) :293-97.
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Semmes, Clovis E. "Sociological Tradition of E. Franklin Frazier: Implications for Black Studies." Journal of Negro Education 55, no. 4 (Fall,1986) :484-94.
Schiele, Jerome H. "E. Franklin Frazier and the Interfacing of Black Sociology and Black Social Work." Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 26, no.2 (June, 1999) :105-25.
Vlasek, Dale R. "E. Franklin Frazier and the problem of assimilation." Ideas in America's Cultures from Republic to Mass Society. 1st ed. Ames : Iowa State University Press, 1982. (Founders E169.1 I34).
Young, Alford A., Jr. "The "Negro Problem" and the Character of the Black Community: Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, and the Constitution of a Black Sociological Tradition, 1920-1935." National Journal of Sociology 7, no. 1 (Summer, 1993) :95-133.
OTHER INFORMATION AND SOURCES
Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. http://149.123.129.10/search~/X?SEARCH=frazier+e+franklin&l=&m=&SORT=D&s=&p=&x=&Da=&Db=&searchscope=1
Encyclopedia Britannica's Guide to Black History http://www.search.eb.com/blackhistory/micro/218/51.html
http://www.howard.edu/library/Social_Work_Library/Franklin_Frazier.htm
Table of Contents
IntroductionWorks by E. Franklin Frazier Books Book Chapters Essays & Journal Articles Papers Works He EditedWorks About E. Franklin Frazier Biographical Evaluations and CommentariesOther Sources
INTRODUCTION
Edward Franklin Frazier was born September 24, 1894 in Baltimore, Maryland. Upon his graduation from Colored High School, Baltimore (June 1912), he was awarded, the School's annual scholarship to Howard University. He was an excellent scholar, pursuing Latin, Greek, German and mathematics, who found time to participate in extracurricular activities involving drama, political science, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. His leadership skills were evidenced in his class presidencies of 1915 and 1916.
On graduation from Howard in 1916, Frazier began a teaching career, experiencing high schools in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia and Maryland. During this time he published an anti-war pamphlet entitled God and War. In 1919 he accepted a fellowship to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts to pursue graduate study, and on completion of his thesis "New Currents of Thought among the Colored People of America" graduated with a Master's degree in sociology in 1920.
In 1920 Frazier became a research fellow at the New York School of Social Work. From 1921 to 1922, he traveled to Denmark on an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship, and on his return, he accepted a position at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia. The Morehouse position allowed him to combine the teaching of sociology with the direction of the Atlanta School of Social Work. It was during his Morehouse tenure that Frazier began his writings on the Negro family. His controversial publication "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" in Forum (June 1927) forced him to leave Morehouse.
He later received a fellowship from the University of Chicago and began pursuit of a doctoral program in 1927. According to G. Franklin Edwards in his "Introduction" to E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations (1968), it was during his study at Chicago where he received his doctoral degree in sociology in 1931, that "Frazier became thoroughly socialized into what later came to be called the 'Chicago School of Sociology'." His doctoral dissertation was later published as The Negro Family in Chicago.
Frazier taught at Fisk University 1929-1931 while a doctoral student at the University of Chicago working on his dissertation, and he continued at Fisk beyond that date until 1934 when he assumed the directorship of Howard University's Department of Sociology. He remained an active Director of the Department until 1959, after which he became Professor Emeritus of the Department of Sociology and the African Studies Program. Frazier was elected President of the American Sociological Association in 1948 and received the Association's MacIver Award for his contributions in the field of sociology.
Frazier was a prolific writer, producing some nine books (published in varying translations and editions) and over one hundred articles and essays. Anthony M. Platt in his article "Racism in Academia" published in the Monthly Review (September 1990) writes "His [Frazier] 1949 textbook The Negro in the United States was the first of its kind, a challenge to conventional 'social problems' texts... His ... Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World, for example was on the cutting edge of progressive scholarship with its effort to understand the political economy of racism in a global context. His Black Bourgeoisie (1957)...was a savage demystification of the 'myth of Negro business'." A significant work, Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States (1940) attempts to construct profiles of Negro youth and analyze socialization influences in the cities of Washington , D.C., and Louisville, Kentucky.
Between 1951 and 1953, he served with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), traveling to Paris, Africa and the Middle East. During this period, he continued his writing, focusing on the struggle of people of Africa and African descent to achieve equality, and on religion. His last book The Negro Church in America was published posthumously in 1964.
Frazier died on May 17, 1962. He has been ranked among the top African Americans for his influence of institutions and practices to accept the demands by African Americans for economic, political and social equality in American life. It is for his work and for his contributions to Howard University that the Howard University School of Social Work has created in his honor the E. Franklin Frazier Research Center (official inauguration May 24, 2000).
In the bibliography which follows, attempt has been made to include all titles published by Frazier, but not the varying translations and/or editions and reprints which may exist. The works about Frazier are necessarily selected. Within the given headings, arrangement of the publications is alphabetical by title. For the convenience of persons who may use this as a working bibliography, call numbers indicating location of the items in the Howard University Libraries System (Divinity, Founders, Social Work, Auxiliary Collection) and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) have been provided. Reproductions of many of Frazier's essays and journal articles are available in The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
Researched and Compiled by Audrey Thompson, Acting Librarian, Social Work Library,Howard University Libraries.May 24, 2000.
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WORKS BY E. FRANKLIN FRAZIERBooks
Frazier, E[dward] Franklin.
The Black Bourgeoisie. New York: Free Press Paperbacks published by Simon & Schuster, 1997. (UGL Circulation, E185.86 .F72813 1997 Auxiliary Coll.).
Black Bourgeoisie: the Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States. New York: Collier Books [1979, c1957]. (Social Work E185.61 F833 1979).
Bourgeoisie Noir. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1955,1969. (MSRC M323 F86 b2).
E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations: Selected Papers, ed. with an Introduction by G. Franklin Edwards. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968.( Founders E185 F835 1968).
The Free Negro family : a study of family origins before the civil war. Nashville: Fisk University Press, 1932. (Social Work E185 F83).
God and War. [n.p.], [n.d.]. (MSRC M231 F869)
The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken Books, 1966, c1963. (Founders BR563 N4 F7 1966B).
The Negro Family in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1932].(MSRC M321.1 F86ne).
The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.(Founders E185.86 .F74 ; Divinity E185.86 .F74).
Negro Freedmen. New York: Arno Press, 1968.
The Negro in the United States. New York: Macmillan Co., 1949. (Divinity E185 F833).
Negro Youth at the Crossways, Their Personality Development in the Middle States. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1940. (Divinity E185.6 .F74).
Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, [1965]. (Founders HT1521 F68 1965).
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Book Chapters
"Black Bourgeoisie: Public and Academic Reactions." in Reflections on Community Studies. Ed. A.L. Vidich, et. al. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1964. 305-311, 349.
"La Bourgeoisie Noire." in Anthology of American Negro Literature, by V.F. Calverton. New York: The Modern Library, 1929. 379-88.
"La Bourgeoisie Noire." in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader .New York : Viking, 1994. 173-181. (MSRC M810.8 P828 1994).
"Commentary on "The Impact of Western Education on the African's Way of Life." in Africa Today. Ed. C. Grove Haines. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1955. 166-71. (Founders DT5 H25).
"The Cultural Background of Southern Negroes." in Selected Papers of the Institute on Cultural Patterns of Newcomers, Welfare Council of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, October 1957.1-14.
"Desegregation as an Object of Sociological Research." in Human Behavior and Social processes: An Interactionist Approach. Ed. Arnold Rose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961. 698-24. (Founders HM131 R78).
"Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class." in The New Negro, by Alain Locke. New York: A. and C. Boni Company, 1925. 333-40. (Founders NX512.3.N5 L6 1970).
"The Garvey Movement" in The Making of Black America, by August Meier. New York: Atheneum, 1969. 204-208. (Founders; Divinity E185 M43).
"Impact of Colonialism on African Social Forms and Personality." in Publication of Norman Harris Memorial Foundation Lectures on Africa in the Modern World. Ed. Calvin W. Stillman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. 70-96.
"Introduction" in Caribbean Studies: A Symposium. Ed. Vera Rubin. Jamaica, B.W.I.: University College of the West Indies, 1957. v-viii (MSRC M972.9 R82).
"The Negro and Racial Conflicts." in One America. Ed. Francis J. Brown and Joseph S. Roucek. New York: Prentice Hall, 1952. 492-504.
"The Negro Family." in The Family: Its Function and Destiny. Ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen. New York: Harper and Bros., 1948. 142-58. (Founders HQ728 A74).
"Negro Harlem: An Ecological Study." in Studies in Human Ecology. Ed. George A. Theodorson. Evanston, Ill: Row, Peterson and Company, 1961. 165-74. (Founders HM206 T48 1961B).
"The Negro in the United States." in Race relations in World Perspective. Ed. Andrew W. Lind. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1955, pp.339-70.
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"The Negro Now." Contact, Book 2: Britain Between West and East (1946). 61-63.
"Negro, Sex Life of the African and American." in The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1961. 769-75. (Founders HQ9 E4).
"Post High School Education of Negroes in New York State." chap. 8 in Inequality of Opportunity in Higher Education, a study of Minority Group and Related Barriers to College Admission, published in A Report to the Temporary Commission on the Need for a State University, by David S. Kerkowitz. Albany: William Press, 1948. 159-74.
"Potential American Negro Contributions to African Social Development." in Africa: Seen by American Negroes, Presence Africaine. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1959. 263-78. ( Founders DT14 A35).
"Problemes de L'Etudiant Noir aux Etats-Unis." in Les Etudiants Noirs Parlent. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1952. 275-83.
"The Racial Issue." in Unity and Difference in American Life. Ed. R.M. MacIver. New York: Harper and Bros., 1947. 43-59.
"Racial Problems in World Society." in Race Relations and Theory: Essays in Honor of Robert E. Park. Ed. Jitsuichi Masuoka and Preston Valien. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961. 38-50.
"Review of Myrdal's 'An American Dilemma'." in Sociology of Race Relations. N.Y.: Free Press, c1980. 159-162. ( Founders HT1521 S546).
"The Socialization of the Negro Child in the Border and Southern States." in A Casebook. Ed. Yehudi A. Cohan. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1961. 45-53.
"Sociologic Factors in the Formation of Sex Attitudes." in Psychosexual Development in Health and Disease. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1949. 244-55.
"Supplementary Studies" in Inequality of opportunity in higher education; a study of minority group and related barriers to college admission: a report to the Temporary Commission on the Need for a State University, by David S. Berkowitz. Albany: Williams Press, 1948.
"Traditions and Patterns of Negro Family Life." in Race and Culture Contacts. Ed. Edward B. Reuter. . New York: McGraw-Hill Company 1934. 191-207. (Founders HT1521 A5).
"A World Community and a Universal Moral Order." in Approaches to Group Understanding, for Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relations to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc. Ed. Lymon Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, and R. M. MacIver. New York: Harper and Bros., 1947. 443-52. (Founders HM101 C678 1945).
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Essays and Journal Articles
"All God's Chillun Got Eyes." Crisis 29 (April, 1925) :254.
"The American Negro's New Leaders." Current History 28 (April, 1928) :56-59.
"An Analysis of Statistics on Negro Illegitimacy in the United States." Social Forces 9 (December, 1932) :249-57.
"Areas of Research in Race Relations." Sociology and Social Research 42 (July-August, 1958) :424-29.
"The Booker T. Washington Papers." The Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 2 (February, 1945) :23-31.
"La Bourgeosie Noire." The Modern Quarterly 5 (1928-30) :78-84.
"Brazil Has No Race Problems." Common Sense 11 (November, 1942) :363-65.
"Certain Aspects of Conflict in the Negro Family." Social Forces 10 (October, 1931) :76-84.
"The Changing Status of the Negro Family." Social Forces 9 (March, 1931) :386-93.
"Chicago, a Cross Section of Negro Life." Opportunity 7 (March, 1929) :70-73.
"Children and Income in Negro Families." (with Eleanor Bernert). Social Forces 25 (December, 1946) :178-82.
"Children in Black and Mulatto Families." The American Journal of Sociology 39 (July, 1933) :12-29.
"A Community School." Southern Workman 54 (October, 1925) :495-64.
"Comparison of Negro-White Relations in Brazil and in the United States." Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series 2, 6, 7, (May, 1944) :251-269.
"Cooperation and the Negro." Crisis 5 (March, 1923) :228-29.
"The Cooperative Movement in Denmark." Southern Workman 52 (September, 1923) :479-84.
"Cooperatives: the Next Step in the Negro's Development." Southern Workman 53 (November, 1924) :505-9.
"A Critical Summary of Articles Contributed to Symposium on Negro Education." The Journal of Negro Education 5 (July, 1936) :531-33.
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"Danish People's High Schools and America." Southern Workman 9 (September, 1922) :425-30.
"Discussion." (Health Conditions in the South). Opportunity 2 (August, 1924) :259.
"The Dubois Program in the Present Crisis." Race 1, no. 1 (Winter, 1935-36) :11-13.
"Ethnic and Minority Groups in Wartime with Special Reference to the Negro." The American Journal of Sociology 48 (November, 1942) :369-77.
"Ethnic Family Patterns: The Negro in the United States." American Journal of Sociology 53 (May, 1948) :435-38.
"The Failure of the Negro Intellectual." Negro Digest (February, 1962) :26-36.
"Family Disorganization among Negroes." Opportunity 9 (1931) :204-207.
"Family Life of the Negro in the Small Town." Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work (1926), pp. 384-388.
"Folk Culture in the Making." Southern Workman 57 (1928) :195-99.
"The Folk High School at Roskilde." Southern Workman 51 (July, 1922) :325-28l.
"Frazier Urges Public Campaign to Implement Court Decisions." Teachers' Bulletin 1 (1950) :3.
"Garvey: a Mass Leader." [New York], 128 (August, 126) 147-48.
"The Garvey Movement." Opportunity 4 (November, 1926) :346-48.
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"Graduate Education in Negro Colleges and Universities." The Journal of Negro Education 2 (July, 1933) :329-41.
"How Present Day Problems of Social Life Affect the Negro." Hospital Social Service 13 (1926) :384-93.
"The Impact of Urban Civilization upon Negro Family Life." American Sociological Review 2 (August, 1937) :609-18.
"Is the Negro Family a Unique Sociological Unit?" Opportunity 5 (June, 1927) :165-8.
"King Cotton." Opportunity (February, 1926) :50-55.
"The Mind of the American Negro." Opportunity 6 (September, 1928) :263-66, 284.
"The Negro and Birth Control." Birth Control Review (March, 1933) :68-70.
"The Negro and Non-resistance." Crisis 27 (March, 1924) :213-14.
"The Negro Community, a Cultural Phenomenon." Social Forces 7 (March, 1929) :415-420.
"The Negro Family." The Annals of the American Acdemy of Political and Social Science 130 (November, 1928) :21-25.
"The Negro Family and Negro Youth." The Journal of Negro Education 9 (July, 1940) :290-299.
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"The Negro Family in Bahia, Brazil." American Sociological Review 7 (August, 1942) :465-78.
"Negro Harlem: an Ecological Study." American Journal of Sociology 43 (July, 1937) :72-88.
"Negro in the Industrial South." Nation 75 (July, 1927) :83-84.
"A Negro Industrial Group." Howard Review 1 (June, 1924) :196-211.
"A Negro looks at the Soviet Union." Proceedings of the Nationalities Panel, The Soviet Union, A Family of Nations in the War. National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, New York, N.Y. November 1943.
"The Negro Middle Class and Desegregation. " Social Problems 4 (April, 1957 ) :291-301.
"The Negro Slave Family." The Journal of Negro History 15 (April,1930) :198-206.
"Neighborhood Union in Atlanta." Southern Workman 52 (September, 1923) :437-42.
"A Note on Negro Education." Opportunity 2 (March, 1924) :75-77.
"Occupational Classes Among Negroes in Cities." The American Journal of Sociology 35 (March, 1930) :718-38.
"The Occupational Differentiation of the Negro in Cities." Southern Workman 57 (May, 1930) :196-200.
"The Pathology of Race Prejudice." Forum 70 (June, 1927) :856-62.
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"The Present Status of the Negro in the American Social Order." The Journal of Negro Education 8 (July, 1939) :376-82.
"Problems and Needs of Negro Children and Youth Resulting from Family Disorganization." The Journal of Negro Education 19 (1950) 269-77.
"Professional Education for Negro Social Workers." Hospital Social Service 18 (1928) :167-76.
"Psychological Factors in Negro Health." Social Forces 3 (March, 1925) :488-90.
"Race: an American Dilemma." Crisis 51 (April 1944) :105-6.
"Race Contacts and the Social Structure." American Sociological Review 14 (February, 1949) :1-11.
"Race Relations in World Perspective." Sociology and Social Research 41 (May-June, 1957) :331-35.
"Rejoinder to Melville J. Herskovits' 'The Negro in Bahia, Brazil: A Problem in Method'." American Sociological Review 8 (August, 1943) :402-404
"Role of Negro Schools in the Post-War World." The Journal of Negro Education 13 (Fall, 1944) :464-73.
"The Role of the Negro in Race Relations in the South." Social Forces 19 (December, 1940) :252-258.
"Significant Study of Urban Negro Life." Crisis 53 (Jan 1946) :25-27.
"Social Equality and the Negro." Opportunity (Journal of Negro of Life) 3 (June,1925) :165-168.
"The Social Status of the Negro." Les Etudes Americaines, 1948.
"Social Work in Race Relations." Crisis 27 (April, 1924) :252-254.
"Sociological Aspects of Race Relations." Courier ( August-September, 1953) :1.
"Sociological Theory and Race Relations."American Sociological Review 12 (June, 1947) :265-71.
"Some Aspects of Family Disorganization among Negros." Opportunity 9 (July, 1931) :204-7.
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"Some Aspects of Negro Business." Opportunity 2 (October, 1924) :293-97.
"Some Aspects of Race Relations in Brazil." Phylon, (Third Quarter,1942) :284-95.
"Some Effects of the Depression on the Negro in Northern Cities." Science and Society 2 (Fall, 1938) :489-99.
"The Status of the Negro in the American Social Order." The Journal of Negro Education 4 (July, 1935) :293-307.
"Theoretical Structure of Sociology and Sociological Research." The British Journal of Sociology 4 (December, 1953) :293-211.
"Three Scourges of the Negro Family." Opportunity 4 (July, 1926) :210-1, 234.
"Training Colored Social Workers in the South." Journal of Social Forces 1 (May, 1923) :440-46.
"Urbanization and its Effects upon the Task of Nation-Building in Africa South of Sahara." The Journal of Negro Education 30 (Summer, 1961) :214-22.
"Urbanization and Social Change in Africa." Sais Review 3 (Winter, 1959) :3-9.
"What is Social Equality." (with John Haynes). The World Tomorrow 9 (April, 1926) :113-14.
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Papers
"Certain Aspects of Conflict in the Negro Family." Publication of the American Sociological Society. Papers. v. 25: 212, May 1931. (MSRC M304 Am3a).
"Crisis in the Education of the Negro." Southside Conference on Discrimination in Higher Education, New Orleans, 1951. 11-22.
"Education and the African Elite." Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology, vol. 5. Changes in Education. Amsterdam: 1956. 90-96.
"The Negro in the United States." Conference on Race Relations in World Perspective. Honolulu, 1954. 339-70.
"The New Negro Middle Class." in The New Negro Thirty Years Afterward, papers contributed to the Sixteenth Annual Spring Conference of the Division of Social Science, Howard University Graduate School. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1955. 25-32. (Founders E185.5 H73 1955A)
Papers, 1908-1972. (Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, D.C.)
"The Present State of Sociological Knowledge concerning Race Relations." in Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology. Milan and Stressa, 1959. 73-80.
"Race Relations in the Caribbean." in The Economic Future of the Caribbean, papers contributed to the Seventh Annual Conference of the Division of the Social Sciences, Howard University Graduate School. Ed. Eric Williams and E. Franklin Frazier. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1944. 27-31.
"Social Trends of Significance for Adult Education" in Proceedings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Land Grant Colleges, November 13-15, 1939, Metropolotian Community Center, Chicago, Illinois.
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Works He EditedConference of Negro Land-Grant Colleges for Coordinating a Program of Cooperative Social Studies (4th : 1948 : Howard University). Report. Washington,D.C. : Howard University Press, 1949. (Founders E185.5 .A82 1948)
The Integration of the Negro into American Society; papers contributed to the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Division of the Social Sciences, May 3 and 4, 1951. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press for the Graduate School, Howard University, 1951. (Founders E184.5 .H68 1951)
SELECTED WORKS ABOUT E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER
Biographical American National Biography. v. 8. New York, Oxford University Press, c1999. 420-421.
The Black 100: a Ranking of the Most Influential African-Americans, Past and Present, revised and updated by Columbus Salley. "A Citadel Press Book" c 1993, 1994, 1999. 143-45. (Founders Ref. E185.96 .S225 1999).
Contemporary Black Biography. v.10, Detroit: Gale Research Inc., c 1996. 63-67. (Founders Ref. E185.96 .C66).
Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.(Founders Ref. CT103 .E56 1997).Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston: Beacon Press, [1962]. (UGL, Core Collection E492.94 33D H5 1962).
Notable Black American Men. Detroit : Gale Research, 1998. 428-31 (Founders Ref. HDV6316).
"Obituary." New York Times, May 22, 1962. L+, 37.
"Obituary." Washington Post. May 18, 1962. C4.
Platt, Anthony M. "The Rebellious Teaching Career of E. Franklin Frazier." Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 13 (Autumn, 1996) :86-90.
Young, James O. Black Writers of the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. (Founders Ref. PS153 N5 Y6 1973A).
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Evaluation of, and Commentary on his Writings
Cayton, Horace R. "E. Franklin Frazier: a Tribute and Review." Review of Religious Research 5 (1964) :137-142.
Henry, Charles P. "Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche: The Howard School of Thought on the Problem of Race." National Political Science Review 5 (1995) :36-56.
Jackson, Walter. "Between Socialism and Nationalism: The Young E. Franklin Frasier." Reconstruction 1, no.3 (1991) :124.
Kilson, Martin. "The Black Bourgeoisie Revisited: From E. Franklin Frazier to the Present." Dissent 30, no. 1 (130) (Winter, 1983) :85-96.
Landry, Bart. "A Reinterpretation of the Writings of Frazier on the Black Middle Class." Social Problems 26, no.2 (December 1978) :211-22.
Odum, Howard W. American Sociology: the Story of Sociology in the United States through 1950 .New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951, p.238.
Platt, Anthony M. "Between Scorn and Longing: Frazier's 'Black Bourgeoisie'." Social Justice 20, no.1-2 (Spring-Summer 1993) : 129-140.
Platt, Anthony M.E. (Tony). "E. Franklin Frazier and Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Setting the Record Straight." Contemporary-Crises 11, no.3 (1987) :265-277.
Platt, Anthony M. E. Franklin Frazier reconsidered . New Brunswick [N.J] : Rutgers University Press, [c1991]. (Founders HM22.U6 F736 1991).
Platt, Anthony M. "Racism in Academia: Lessons from the Life of E. Franklin Frazier." Monthly Review 42, no.4 (September 1990) : 29-46.
Platt, Anthony M. and Chandler, Susan. "Constant Struggle: E. Franklin Frazier and Black Social Work in the 1920's." Social Work 33, no. 4 (July-August, 1988) :293-97.
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Semmes, Clovis E. "Sociological Tradition of E. Franklin Frazier: Implications for Black Studies." Journal of Negro Education 55, no. 4 (Fall,1986) :484-94.
Schiele, Jerome H. "E. Franklin Frazier and the Interfacing of Black Sociology and Black Social Work." Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 26, no.2 (June, 1999) :105-25.
Vlasek, Dale R. "E. Franklin Frazier and the problem of assimilation." Ideas in America's Cultures from Republic to Mass Society. 1st ed. Ames : Iowa State University Press, 1982. (Founders E169.1 I34).
Young, Alford A., Jr. "The "Negro Problem" and the Character of the Black Community: Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, and the Constitution of a Black Sociological Tradition, 1920-1935." National Journal of Sociology 7, no. 1 (Summer, 1993) :95-133.
OTHER INFORMATION AND SOURCES
Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. http://149.123.129.10/search~/X?SEARCH=frazier+e+franklin&l=&m=&SORT=D&s=&p=&x=&Da=&Db=&searchscope=1
Encyclopedia Britannica's Guide to Black History http://www.search.eb.com/blackhistory/micro/218/51.html
http://www.howard.edu/library/Social_Work_Library/Franklin_Frazier.htm
"Black History Time Capsule" --The Mirror of Liberty* David Ruggles
David Ruggles
The hazards of anti-slavery journalism
Graham Russell Hodges
Abolitionists organizing the battle against slavery during the 1830s quickly mastered the potentials of the penny press and the post office in their campaign to compel Americans to examine their consciences about the South’s “peculiar institution.” The movement published millions of broadsides and introduced fiery newspapers advancing the cause. Its emotional exhortations convinced thousands of ordinary Americans to voice their anger at human bondage by sending nearly a million petitions through the mails, beseeching Congress to abolish slavery. Federal legislators had already passed a gag rule prohibiting such discussion. Former President John Quincy Adams, now a congressman, often raised the petitions on the floor, forcing opponents into embarrassing stipulations to table the letters. Undeterred anti-slavery citizens continued the cascade of pleas against any enlargement of the servile system. The movement survived violence, too, when anti-abolitionist rioters burned presses and killed one editor in Illinois in 1837. White editors William Lloyd Garrison and David Lee Child are widely known for their brave commitment to abolitionist publishing. Other than Frederick Douglass, far less is known about the courageous black journalists who strived to extinguish slavery. David Ruggles, an African-American printer in New York City during the 1830s, was the prototype for black activist journalists of his time. During his 20-year career, Ruggles poured out hundreds of articles, published at least five pamphlets and operated the first African-American press. His magazine, Mirror of Liberty, intermittently issued between 1838 and 1841, is widely recognized as the first periodical published by a black American. Ruggles also displayed unyielding courage against constant violence, which eventually destroyed his health and career. His story reveals the valor required of a black editor struggling against the pitiless hatred of the pro-slavery forces and the yawning indifference of most Americans. Ruggles’ valiant work ran the spectrum of the work of journalists. He was an agent, writer, printer, publisher and subject. He was in fact America’s first black working journalist. His career epitomized the fusion of professionalism and activism, so characteristic of later black journalists, that would propel him to the center of racial conflict. Ruggles was born in norwich, Connecticut, in 1810, the eldest of seven children of free black parents. His father, David Sr., was a blacksmith. His mother, Nancy, was a noted caterer and a founding member of the local Methodist church. Ruggles was educated at religious charity schools in Norwich. By the age of 17, he was in New York, first working as a mariner; in 1828 he opened a grocery shop. At first he sold liquor. Observing, as did other black abolitionists, the damage done to the black community by drink, he converted to the temperance movement. He advocated it in his advertisements in Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first black newspaper, which was published by Samuel Eli Cornish, a black Presbyterian minister. By the early 1830s, Ruggles became involved in the growing anti-slavery movement in New York. White radicals, disenchanted by reform measures, now joined blacks demanding the immediate end of slavery. His grocery shop at 1 Cortlandt Street was the nation’s first black bookstore until a mob destroyed it. In 1833, the Emancipator, an abolitionist weekly, appointed him as its agent to canvass for subscribers throughout the Middle Atlantic states. By 1834, Ruggles was also writing regularly. That year, he published his own pamphlet entitled The “Extinguisher” Extinguished: or David M. Reese, M.D. “Used Up…” a satirical screed attacking the leading local proponent of the American Colonization Society. This organization, which roused fiery anger in Ruggles and other blacks, argued that the only solution for America’s racial problems was to ship all free blacks to Africa. However implausible this sounds today, the plan was very popular among whites in the antebellum United States. Yet blacks understood, Ruggles thundered, that the plan did not threaten the future of slavery. His self-published booklet was the first imprint by an African American. Ruggles used his own press the next year in his publication Abrogation of the seventh commandment, by the American Churches, which contended that Northern white women should shun their Southern sisters, whom, he argued, acquiesced in the violation of God’s commandments by letting their husbands keep enslaved black women as mistresses. Ruggles beseeched Northern women to consider whether they would “tolerate the adoption of a system which would recognize as their domestic servant the spurious off-spring of their own husbands, brothers, and sons.” He lashed out at Southern women as “inexcusably criminal” for disregarding the sexual exploitation of enslaved black women. Ruggles’ jeremiad foreshadowed similar developments in the nascent feminist movement and revealed growing personal splits between North and South. Ruggles believed deeply that newspapers were necessary tools of anyone opposed to the evil of slavery. He enunciated his beliefs in a series of six articles published in the Emancipator early in 1835. Ruggles was worried that a lack of subscriptions from blacks might doom anti-slavery journalism. He urged African Americans to do their duty by supporting the Emancipator and other anti-slavery journals because they were the most effective weapons against servitude. In a nation where few blacks could vote and none could hold office, he remarked, freedom of the press was blacks’ most precious liberty. Costing only a few cents a copy, the newspapers were an essential and inexpensive means to combat slavery. For blacks to ignore their “trumpets of freedom” was to display the personal degradation of enslavement. No one in America, he contended with remarkable prescience, could be neutral on the moral issue of slavery. Blacks and sympathetic whites had a moral obligation to support abolitionist newspapers. Ruggles raised more than his pen in his personal war against the slavocracy. In 1835, he and several other young black activists organized the New York Committee of Vigilance. Manhattan was then swarming with “kidnappers,” agents of Southern slave owners whose chattel had fled north to freedom. With the help of New York City magistrates, kidnappers seized blacks off the street, held a quick hearing to “prove” their identity and within a matter of hours forced their unfortunate victims onto boats headed for Southern ports. Angered by this practice, Ruggles and the rest of the Committee of Vigilance openly confronted slave catchers, demanded that the city government grant jury trials to fugitives and offered legal assistance to them. Backed by the New York Manumission Society, whose members included the lawyer William Jay, son of Chief Justice John Jay, the Committee of Vigilance proved highly effective in protecting the rights of local blacks. On several occasions, Ruggles went to private homes where enslaved blacks were hidden and informed the servants that they were actually free. In case anyone missed these activities, Ruggles often published such adventures in abolitionist newspapers such as the Emancipator and The Liberator. One of Ruggles’ most controversial methods was to demand the arrest of white sea captains he suspected of trading in slaves. Illegal since 1808, slave trading still occurred clandestinely. Ruggles’ unmasking of these transactions nearly cost him his freedom. In December 1836, a Portuguese vessel captained by Juan Evangelista de Souza arrived in New York harbor. Ruggles heard from wharfside sources that the captain held five blacks in slavery and intended to head south to sell them. Under a writ of habeas corpus, Ruggles demanded that the five enslaved blacks be held in a local jail until a hearing could be held on their status. He also sought successfully the arrest of Captain de Souza on charges of slave trading. This was the second time Ruggles had a white man arrested on such charges. His boldness infuriated his opponents. While the case wound through the courts, de Souza, who was free on bail, and a local police officer named Tobias Boudinot and a slave catcher named D.D. Nash decided to take matters into their own hands. Late on the night of December 28, 1836, they arrived at Ruggles’ home at 67 Lispenard Street. They knocked loudly and asked to speak to David. When Ruggles told them to come back in the morning, they tried to break down his door. Ruggles escaped and returned later with a watchman. At a hearing at the police station, Ruggles exposed his assailants’ plot to grab him and put him on a vessel headed for Savannah, Georgia, where he would be sold into slavery. Frustrated, Nash tried to arrest Ruggles on a specious writ for any black who looked like Jesse or Abraham, generic names for slaves. If it hadn’t been for the help of his white allies among local lawyers, Ruggles doubtless would have been shipped off into slavery. Sometime later, Nash proclaimed—during a mobbing of a white abolitionist named John Hopper in Savannah—that he would give “a thousand dollars if he had that nigger named Ruggles in my hands as he is the leader of [the abolitionists].” Undeterred by these threats, Ruggles continued to publish his articles and pamphlets, writing dozens of pieces for newspapers throughout the Northeast. He was also the most visible conductor on the Underground Railroad. Ruggles claimed to have helped 400 fugitive slaves during the 1830s. One such escaped slave later became one of the most famous Americans of the 19th century. In his classic autobiography, Frederick Douglass recalled his dire straits just after he fled north to freedom in New York City in late September 1838. Though exhilarated by his newfound freedom, Douglass was terrified of slave catchers. The young fugitive was broke, lonely and spent several nights sleeping amidst empty barrels on the wharves. Fortunately, he met a sailor who took him to the print shop of David Ruggles, who sheltered him and welcomed him to freedom with great celebration. A few days later, Frederick was married to Anna Murray, a free black woman, in Ruggles’ shop in a ceremony led by James W.C. Pennington, a former fugitive turned Presbyterian minister. Immediately after the wedding, Douglass and his new wife traveled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, armed with a letter of recommendation from Ruggles and a $5 bill. In just a few years Douglass became one of America’s most famous abolitionist orators. Today, his autobiography is read by tens of thousands of college students and is considered a classic of American literature. By the time douglass met him, Ruggles had become one of the most notorious black abolitionists in the United States. A look at a remarkable incident, which took place right around the time Douglass arrived in New York City, reveals the energy and courage demanded of Ruggles as he used his pen and life to fight against slavery. The Darg Case, as it was called, caused a furor in New York’s newspapers in the autumn of 1838. Its proceeding exposed the extreme dangers for Ruggles and other anti-slavery warriors. New York City residents in the 1830s were deeply divided over the future of America’s peculiar institution. It was naturally abhorred by the city’s 16,000 black residents, many of whom had been only recently emancipated by legislative decree ending slavery in New York state in 1827. Much of the city’s elite also worked against it, though by different means. Some elite urbanites favored the strategy of the American Colonization Society, with its plan of sending free blacks back to Africa. Others, notably the Jay family, preferred black self-help efforts at home and donated money to the New York Manumission Society and its principal agency, the African Free School. Though the school had declined recently, it was the alma mater of the city’s black elite. A more radical wing of the Manumission Society sided with “immediatists”—anti-slavery activists such as William Lloyd Garrison and the Tappan brothers, founders of Dun and Bradstreet—who wanted slavery ended now, not later. One of the most active Manumission Society members with this view was Barney Corse, who, for more than 10 years, had helped self-emancipated or fugitive slaves come north and helped local blacks protect their freedom against kidnappers. Joining him was the venerable Isaac T. Hopper, a Quaker abolitionist since the 1780s, and Ruggles. This trio had successfully battled city officials and kidnappers on several occasions. At other times, when they lost, Ruggles used his press to blast this unfair system. Some situations were uncomplicated; others, such as the Darg Case, were complex. The facts, as they came out in the subsequent trial, were as follows: On August 25, 1838, John P. Darg, a Virginia slaveholder, arrived in New York City with his slave Thomas Hughes. The issue of Southerners bringing their human chattel to a free state was under intense negotiation between the governors of New York and Virginia, but Darg apparently felt confident about the status of his servant. But a few days later Hughes came to Hopper’s house, seeking refuge. The Quaker, however, was initially reluctant and asked Hughes to leave his home. The next day, the New York Sun, the most vitriolic of the penny press, published a notice offering a reward for the return of Hughes and the $7,000 or $8,000 he had taken with him. Hopper, Corse and perhaps Ruggles served as go-betweens for Darg and Hughes. The slave no longer had all the money, having given some of it to others who helped him escape and a portion to some local gamblers. Corse and Ruggles decided that returning the cash was moral but turning over Hughes was not. They convinced Darg to free Hughes provided that he gave back as much money as he took. When the sum turned out to be far less than Darg demanded, the slave master ordered Corse and Ruggles arrested for grand larceny. Corse quickly found bail, but Ruggles was jailed for two days with common criminals, even though he had not actually been charged with anything. After that incident, a caricature of the three, entitled “The Disappointed Abolitionists,” was published, suggesting that they were really interested in the reward and, rather than trying to free slaves, were setting up an extortion ring to prey on unwary masters. The case remained newsworthy over the next few months. In October, a group of black citizens honored Ruggles by giving him a cane with a golden knob. Sadly, the struggle was taking its toll on the valiant Ruggles. Now only 28 years old, he was nearly blind and was afflicted with severe bowel disorders. All of his money and time went into the movement, so he often was homeless. Worse afflictions were on the way, and they came from a surprising source. In 1837, samuel eli cornish, aided by Philip A. Bell, resurrected his black newspaper and renamed it the Colored American. Ruggles quickly became a regular contributor. The editors in turn frequently wrote approvingly of his actions. But in early 1839, a terrible dispute arose that ended Ruggles’ career in New York City. Hearing rumors that a black hotelier named John Russell was hiding captive blacks before they were transported south, Ruggles, without Cornish’s knowledge, inserted an article in the Colored American accusing the innkeeper of helping kidnappers. Russell sued the newspaper, Ruggles and Cornish for libel and won a judgment of $600—which nearly bankrupted the weekly journal. Furious, Cornish attacked Ruggles in print. Although wealthy benefactors soon paid the libel award, Cornish campaigned to have Ruggles driven out of the movement. One method was to demand that Ruggles explain every cash expenditure of the Committee of Vigilance. After a careful accounting, it appeared that the committee’s funds were short $400. Broken in health and deeply hurt by Cornish’s accusations, Ruggles was forced to resign his post as secretary of the committee. Before doing so, he published his last imprint in New York City, A Plea for a Man and a Brother, in which he tried to refute Cornish’s indictments. In truth, the more conservative Cornish and his many allies had tired of Ruggles’ radical methods and sought less confrontational means to fight slavery. Although he still published regularly in white abolitionist journals, Ruggles’ plight was desperate. Now blind and seriously ill from several diseases, he left New York for Massachusetts. His father died in 1841. Fearful that Ruggles might soon follow him to the grave, William C. Nell and other Boston blacks honored the ailing man with a dinner and a gift of badly needed funds. They proclaimed him a great soldier in the war against slavery. That winter, noted author Lydia Maria Child and her husband, David Lee Child, editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, arranged for Ruggles to join a radical commune in Northampton, Massachusetts. Ruggles, grateful for their help and anxious to find a cure for his many ailments, became first an adherent and later a doctor of hydropathy, a water cure regimen then sweeping the nation. By 1845, Ruggles established the first water cure hospital in the United States. He continued writing a dozen or more articles on abolitionism annually as well as publishing in water-cure journals. Just as his new career soared to new heights, Ruggles tragically succumbed to a severe bowel infection on December 18, 1849. His family came to retrieve his body and buried him in their plot in Norwich. As the anti-slavery movement mourned Ruggles, William Lloyd Garrison summarized his many achievements and plaintively noted “his biography is yet to be written.” One hundred fifty years later, that fact is still true, but Ruggles may be remembered for his fusion of committed journalism and fearless activism. Graham Russell Hodges, professor of history at Colgate University, is the author of Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863. He is writing a biography of David Ruggles.
http://www.freedomforum.org/publications/msj/courage.summer2000/y02.html
The hazards of anti-slavery journalism
Graham Russell Hodges
Abolitionists organizing the battle against slavery during the 1830s quickly mastered the potentials of the penny press and the post office in their campaign to compel Americans to examine their consciences about the South’s “peculiar institution.” The movement published millions of broadsides and introduced fiery newspapers advancing the cause. Its emotional exhortations convinced thousands of ordinary Americans to voice their anger at human bondage by sending nearly a million petitions through the mails, beseeching Congress to abolish slavery. Federal legislators had already passed a gag rule prohibiting such discussion. Former President John Quincy Adams, now a congressman, often raised the petitions on the floor, forcing opponents into embarrassing stipulations to table the letters. Undeterred anti-slavery citizens continued the cascade of pleas against any enlargement of the servile system. The movement survived violence, too, when anti-abolitionist rioters burned presses and killed one editor in Illinois in 1837. White editors William Lloyd Garrison and David Lee Child are widely known for their brave commitment to abolitionist publishing. Other than Frederick Douglass, far less is known about the courageous black journalists who strived to extinguish slavery. David Ruggles, an African-American printer in New York City during the 1830s, was the prototype for black activist journalists of his time. During his 20-year career, Ruggles poured out hundreds of articles, published at least five pamphlets and operated the first African-American press. His magazine, Mirror of Liberty, intermittently issued between 1838 and 1841, is widely recognized as the first periodical published by a black American. Ruggles also displayed unyielding courage against constant violence, which eventually destroyed his health and career. His story reveals the valor required of a black editor struggling against the pitiless hatred of the pro-slavery forces and the yawning indifference of most Americans. Ruggles’ valiant work ran the spectrum of the work of journalists. He was an agent, writer, printer, publisher and subject. He was in fact America’s first black working journalist. His career epitomized the fusion of professionalism and activism, so characteristic of later black journalists, that would propel him to the center of racial conflict. Ruggles was born in norwich, Connecticut, in 1810, the eldest of seven children of free black parents. His father, David Sr., was a blacksmith. His mother, Nancy, was a noted caterer and a founding member of the local Methodist church. Ruggles was educated at religious charity schools in Norwich. By the age of 17, he was in New York, first working as a mariner; in 1828 he opened a grocery shop. At first he sold liquor. Observing, as did other black abolitionists, the damage done to the black community by drink, he converted to the temperance movement. He advocated it in his advertisements in Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first black newspaper, which was published by Samuel Eli Cornish, a black Presbyterian minister. By the early 1830s, Ruggles became involved in the growing anti-slavery movement in New York. White radicals, disenchanted by reform measures, now joined blacks demanding the immediate end of slavery. His grocery shop at 1 Cortlandt Street was the nation’s first black bookstore until a mob destroyed it. In 1833, the Emancipator, an abolitionist weekly, appointed him as its agent to canvass for subscribers throughout the Middle Atlantic states. By 1834, Ruggles was also writing regularly. That year, he published his own pamphlet entitled The “Extinguisher” Extinguished: or David M. Reese, M.D. “Used Up…” a satirical screed attacking the leading local proponent of the American Colonization Society. This organization, which roused fiery anger in Ruggles and other blacks, argued that the only solution for America’s racial problems was to ship all free blacks to Africa. However implausible this sounds today, the plan was very popular among whites in the antebellum United States. Yet blacks understood, Ruggles thundered, that the plan did not threaten the future of slavery. His self-published booklet was the first imprint by an African American. Ruggles used his own press the next year in his publication Abrogation of the seventh commandment, by the American Churches, which contended that Northern white women should shun their Southern sisters, whom, he argued, acquiesced in the violation of God’s commandments by letting their husbands keep enslaved black women as mistresses. Ruggles beseeched Northern women to consider whether they would “tolerate the adoption of a system which would recognize as their domestic servant the spurious off-spring of their own husbands, brothers, and sons.” He lashed out at Southern women as “inexcusably criminal” for disregarding the sexual exploitation of enslaved black women. Ruggles’ jeremiad foreshadowed similar developments in the nascent feminist movement and revealed growing personal splits between North and South. Ruggles believed deeply that newspapers were necessary tools of anyone opposed to the evil of slavery. He enunciated his beliefs in a series of six articles published in the Emancipator early in 1835. Ruggles was worried that a lack of subscriptions from blacks might doom anti-slavery journalism. He urged African Americans to do their duty by supporting the Emancipator and other anti-slavery journals because they were the most effective weapons against servitude. In a nation where few blacks could vote and none could hold office, he remarked, freedom of the press was blacks’ most precious liberty. Costing only a few cents a copy, the newspapers were an essential and inexpensive means to combat slavery. For blacks to ignore their “trumpets of freedom” was to display the personal degradation of enslavement. No one in America, he contended with remarkable prescience, could be neutral on the moral issue of slavery. Blacks and sympathetic whites had a moral obligation to support abolitionist newspapers. Ruggles raised more than his pen in his personal war against the slavocracy. In 1835, he and several other young black activists organized the New York Committee of Vigilance. Manhattan was then swarming with “kidnappers,” agents of Southern slave owners whose chattel had fled north to freedom. With the help of New York City magistrates, kidnappers seized blacks off the street, held a quick hearing to “prove” their identity and within a matter of hours forced their unfortunate victims onto boats headed for Southern ports. Angered by this practice, Ruggles and the rest of the Committee of Vigilance openly confronted slave catchers, demanded that the city government grant jury trials to fugitives and offered legal assistance to them. Backed by the New York Manumission Society, whose members included the lawyer William Jay, son of Chief Justice John Jay, the Committee of Vigilance proved highly effective in protecting the rights of local blacks. On several occasions, Ruggles went to private homes where enslaved blacks were hidden and informed the servants that they were actually free. In case anyone missed these activities, Ruggles often published such adventures in abolitionist newspapers such as the Emancipator and The Liberator. One of Ruggles’ most controversial methods was to demand the arrest of white sea captains he suspected of trading in slaves. Illegal since 1808, slave trading still occurred clandestinely. Ruggles’ unmasking of these transactions nearly cost him his freedom. In December 1836, a Portuguese vessel captained by Juan Evangelista de Souza arrived in New York harbor. Ruggles heard from wharfside sources that the captain held five blacks in slavery and intended to head south to sell them. Under a writ of habeas corpus, Ruggles demanded that the five enslaved blacks be held in a local jail until a hearing could be held on their status. He also sought successfully the arrest of Captain de Souza on charges of slave trading. This was the second time Ruggles had a white man arrested on such charges. His boldness infuriated his opponents. While the case wound through the courts, de Souza, who was free on bail, and a local police officer named Tobias Boudinot and a slave catcher named D.D. Nash decided to take matters into their own hands. Late on the night of December 28, 1836, they arrived at Ruggles’ home at 67 Lispenard Street. They knocked loudly and asked to speak to David. When Ruggles told them to come back in the morning, they tried to break down his door. Ruggles escaped and returned later with a watchman. At a hearing at the police station, Ruggles exposed his assailants’ plot to grab him and put him on a vessel headed for Savannah, Georgia, where he would be sold into slavery. Frustrated, Nash tried to arrest Ruggles on a specious writ for any black who looked like Jesse or Abraham, generic names for slaves. If it hadn’t been for the help of his white allies among local lawyers, Ruggles doubtless would have been shipped off into slavery. Sometime later, Nash proclaimed—during a mobbing of a white abolitionist named John Hopper in Savannah—that he would give “a thousand dollars if he had that nigger named Ruggles in my hands as he is the leader of [the abolitionists].” Undeterred by these threats, Ruggles continued to publish his articles and pamphlets, writing dozens of pieces for newspapers throughout the Northeast. He was also the most visible conductor on the Underground Railroad. Ruggles claimed to have helped 400 fugitive slaves during the 1830s. One such escaped slave later became one of the most famous Americans of the 19th century. In his classic autobiography, Frederick Douglass recalled his dire straits just after he fled north to freedom in New York City in late September 1838. Though exhilarated by his newfound freedom, Douglass was terrified of slave catchers. The young fugitive was broke, lonely and spent several nights sleeping amidst empty barrels on the wharves. Fortunately, he met a sailor who took him to the print shop of David Ruggles, who sheltered him and welcomed him to freedom with great celebration. A few days later, Frederick was married to Anna Murray, a free black woman, in Ruggles’ shop in a ceremony led by James W.C. Pennington, a former fugitive turned Presbyterian minister. Immediately after the wedding, Douglass and his new wife traveled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, armed with a letter of recommendation from Ruggles and a $5 bill. In just a few years Douglass became one of America’s most famous abolitionist orators. Today, his autobiography is read by tens of thousands of college students and is considered a classic of American literature. By the time douglass met him, Ruggles had become one of the most notorious black abolitionists in the United States. A look at a remarkable incident, which took place right around the time Douglass arrived in New York City, reveals the energy and courage demanded of Ruggles as he used his pen and life to fight against slavery. The Darg Case, as it was called, caused a furor in New York’s newspapers in the autumn of 1838. Its proceeding exposed the extreme dangers for Ruggles and other anti-slavery warriors. New York City residents in the 1830s were deeply divided over the future of America’s peculiar institution. It was naturally abhorred by the city’s 16,000 black residents, many of whom had been only recently emancipated by legislative decree ending slavery in New York state in 1827. Much of the city’s elite also worked against it, though by different means. Some elite urbanites favored the strategy of the American Colonization Society, with its plan of sending free blacks back to Africa. Others, notably the Jay family, preferred black self-help efforts at home and donated money to the New York Manumission Society and its principal agency, the African Free School. Though the school had declined recently, it was the alma mater of the city’s black elite. A more radical wing of the Manumission Society sided with “immediatists”—anti-slavery activists such as William Lloyd Garrison and the Tappan brothers, founders of Dun and Bradstreet—who wanted slavery ended now, not later. One of the most active Manumission Society members with this view was Barney Corse, who, for more than 10 years, had helped self-emancipated or fugitive slaves come north and helped local blacks protect their freedom against kidnappers. Joining him was the venerable Isaac T. Hopper, a Quaker abolitionist since the 1780s, and Ruggles. This trio had successfully battled city officials and kidnappers on several occasions. At other times, when they lost, Ruggles used his press to blast this unfair system. Some situations were uncomplicated; others, such as the Darg Case, were complex. The facts, as they came out in the subsequent trial, were as follows: On August 25, 1838, John P. Darg, a Virginia slaveholder, arrived in New York City with his slave Thomas Hughes. The issue of Southerners bringing their human chattel to a free state was under intense negotiation between the governors of New York and Virginia, but Darg apparently felt confident about the status of his servant. But a few days later Hughes came to Hopper’s house, seeking refuge. The Quaker, however, was initially reluctant and asked Hughes to leave his home. The next day, the New York Sun, the most vitriolic of the penny press, published a notice offering a reward for the return of Hughes and the $7,000 or $8,000 he had taken with him. Hopper, Corse and perhaps Ruggles served as go-betweens for Darg and Hughes. The slave no longer had all the money, having given some of it to others who helped him escape and a portion to some local gamblers. Corse and Ruggles decided that returning the cash was moral but turning over Hughes was not. They convinced Darg to free Hughes provided that he gave back as much money as he took. When the sum turned out to be far less than Darg demanded, the slave master ordered Corse and Ruggles arrested for grand larceny. Corse quickly found bail, but Ruggles was jailed for two days with common criminals, even though he had not actually been charged with anything. After that incident, a caricature of the three, entitled “The Disappointed Abolitionists,” was published, suggesting that they were really interested in the reward and, rather than trying to free slaves, were setting up an extortion ring to prey on unwary masters. The case remained newsworthy over the next few months. In October, a group of black citizens honored Ruggles by giving him a cane with a golden knob. Sadly, the struggle was taking its toll on the valiant Ruggles. Now only 28 years old, he was nearly blind and was afflicted with severe bowel disorders. All of his money and time went into the movement, so he often was homeless. Worse afflictions were on the way, and they came from a surprising source. In 1837, samuel eli cornish, aided by Philip A. Bell, resurrected his black newspaper and renamed it the Colored American. Ruggles quickly became a regular contributor. The editors in turn frequently wrote approvingly of his actions. But in early 1839, a terrible dispute arose that ended Ruggles’ career in New York City. Hearing rumors that a black hotelier named John Russell was hiding captive blacks before they were transported south, Ruggles, without Cornish’s knowledge, inserted an article in the Colored American accusing the innkeeper of helping kidnappers. Russell sued the newspaper, Ruggles and Cornish for libel and won a judgment of $600—which nearly bankrupted the weekly journal. Furious, Cornish attacked Ruggles in print. Although wealthy benefactors soon paid the libel award, Cornish campaigned to have Ruggles driven out of the movement. One method was to demand that Ruggles explain every cash expenditure of the Committee of Vigilance. After a careful accounting, it appeared that the committee’s funds were short $400. Broken in health and deeply hurt by Cornish’s accusations, Ruggles was forced to resign his post as secretary of the committee. Before doing so, he published his last imprint in New York City, A Plea for a Man and a Brother, in which he tried to refute Cornish’s indictments. In truth, the more conservative Cornish and his many allies had tired of Ruggles’ radical methods and sought less confrontational means to fight slavery. Although he still published regularly in white abolitionist journals, Ruggles’ plight was desperate. Now blind and seriously ill from several diseases, he left New York for Massachusetts. His father died in 1841. Fearful that Ruggles might soon follow him to the grave, William C. Nell and other Boston blacks honored the ailing man with a dinner and a gift of badly needed funds. They proclaimed him a great soldier in the war against slavery. That winter, noted author Lydia Maria Child and her husband, David Lee Child, editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, arranged for Ruggles to join a radical commune in Northampton, Massachusetts. Ruggles, grateful for their help and anxious to find a cure for his many ailments, became first an adherent and later a doctor of hydropathy, a water cure regimen then sweeping the nation. By 1845, Ruggles established the first water cure hospital in the United States. He continued writing a dozen or more articles on abolitionism annually as well as publishing in water-cure journals. Just as his new career soared to new heights, Ruggles tragically succumbed to a severe bowel infection on December 18, 1849. His family came to retrieve his body and buried him in their plot in Norwich. As the anti-slavery movement mourned Ruggles, William Lloyd Garrison summarized his many achievements and plaintively noted “his biography is yet to be written.” One hundred fifty years later, that fact is still true, but Ruggles may be remembered for his fusion of committed journalism and fearless activism. Graham Russell Hodges, professor of history at Colgate University, is the author of Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863. He is writing a biography of David Ruggles.
http://www.freedomforum.org/publications/msj/courage.summer2000/y02.html
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
OBAMA'S VICTORY**
Read More: Barack Obama, Barack Obama Acceptance Speech, Obama Acceptance Speech, Obama Acceptance Speech Quotes, Obama Election Night, Obama Election Speech, Obama ELection Speech Text, Obama Election Speech Video, Obama Grant Park Acceptance Speech, Obama Speech, Obama Victory Speech, Obama Victory Speech Grant Park, Obama's Victory Speech, President Obama, Video, Watch Obama Acceptance Speech, Watch Obama Election Speech, Watch Obama Speech, Politics News
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***SCROLL FOR VIDEO, FULL TEXT***The election is over.
Tonight President-Elect Obama celebrated in Grant Park and delivered remarks to the hundreds of thousands who turned out. He spoke just before midnight, joined by his family onstage before he began. SEE PHOTOS
"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
"It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.
"It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
He complimented Sen. McCain, mentioning the phone call he had received earlier in the night.
He thanked "the love of my love" Michelle Obama as well as daughters Sasha and Malia, "I love you both more than you can imagine. You have earned the puppy that is coming with us."
And he took a moment to remember his grandmother.
He promised, "I will listen to you... I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation... Block by block, brick by brick, callused hand by callused hand."
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Young Gifted & Black * Artistic Expressions*
AfroCentric people by designed--- were born a gifted people. There is nothing more relaxing than creating something from an superb insight and divine vision. To relay a message. Black images are scares...Presenting these images of beauty, power and family show's how we view our beauty and creativity. We will be featuring several artist and their unique creations...hope you enjoy*
http://www.african-art-paintings.com/
Queen Amina*
Saturday, November 1, 2008
In black America, few dare hope for racial change*
Agence France-Presse - 10/31/2008 4:07 PM GMT
In black America, few dare hope for racial change
Despite Barack Obama's message of change and hope, fears persist in the black community about what his election as president could mean for the legacy of racism in America.
Namely, that it might mean nothing at all.
"America is still one of the most segregated countries by race and by class in the industrialized world," said Dedrick Muhammad, research associate at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, a think tank for social justice.
Muhammad pointed to research showing that black Americans remain far behind the rest of the country economically, with median wealth one-tenth of that in white America, and one in three black children born into poverty.
Like most black Americans, Muhammad supports Obama's historic bid to become America's first black president.
However, he said the Illinois senator's campaign tactic of largely avoiding discussion of race in his campaign has "driven me crazy."
"What saddens me today is that we don't talk about black-white inequality," he said. "I see in Obama a winning strategy, but it is sad to me."
For the 47-year-old son of a white American mother and black Kenyan father to gain the lead he currently holds over his Republican rival John McCain, Obama has had to tip-toe around any potential racial controversy, analysts say.
"Obama has very carefully avoided discussing race except when he had to," said Gary Weaver, an author and professor of cross-cultural studies at American University, noting Obama made just one major policy address on race during the campaign.
"I think there genuinely are people who are afraid that somehow an African-American as president would destroy the purity of the country," he said.
But even Obama's relative silence has not muted the issue. Weaver pointed to numerous attempts by his opponents to raise the topic of race, some of them blatant, others covert.
"There are enough coded messages coming out from the Republican side," said Weaver, ranging from mentions of his "urban" agenda that contrast with images of mainly white rural America, to assertions of "socialism" in his economic policy that implicitly tie him to foreigners.
"These coded messages subtly get across the issue of race," said Weaver.
Despite America's attempts to move past racial prejudice, research has shown that racial bias lingers in the United States, 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
A recent study by San Diego State University and the University of Chicago on politics and racial attitudes suggested that "ethnicity and national identity may play a larger role than often realized in how political candidates are perceived."
"A black candidate is implicitly conceived of as being less American than a white candidate," it said.
Prominent African-Americans have said they understand Obama's need to keep the black community at arm's length in order to win.
But they say that kind of dance leaves many unanswered questions about Obama's commitment to black issues in terms of poverty, employment opportunities and substandard education, if he does win on November 4.
"To me it sounds more like the African-American community is a kind of hidden mistress. Everybody assumes an affair is going on but nobody is quite sure," said Joy Zarembka, author of "The Pigment of Your Imagination: Mixed Race in a Global Society."
Zarembka said the new emphasis by Obama supporters on the buzzword "post-racial" ignores the importance of the black community, and she is concerned that an Obama victory could eliminate policies that aim to give minorities a better chance at employment and education.
"I have great concerns about an affirmative action policy that moves forward in a race-neutral way," she said.
John Johnson, political action chair of the Virginia State conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said he has heard those types of concerns, but believes Obama presents a new narrative on blacks in American society.
"There is an opportunity to uplift the race. The role model potential is outstanding," he said, adding that an Obama victory could have a wider effect on accepting diversity in America.
"I think it will have an impact on making all of America more comfortable with all Americans."
Lena Williams, 58, author of "It's the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races," said that when she volunteered for the Obama campaign, the younger and more enthusiastic supporters asked why she was so "mellow."
"America has a way of breaking your heart," she answered. "It makes you very cautious."
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