The Black bourgeoisie
By: by E. Franklin Frazier.
Publisher: Free Press Paperbacks published by Simon & Schuster
Published: 1962
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
Subjects: Afro-Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964.; Middle class -- United States.; United States -- Social conditions -- 1960-1980.; United States -- Race relations.
Work titles: Bourgeoisie noire.
Description: When it was first published in 19577, E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie was simultaneously reviled and revered - revered for its skillful dissection of one of America's most complex communities, reviled for daring to cast a critical eye on a section of black society that had achieved the trappings of the white, bourgeois ideal. The author traces the evolution of this enigmatic class from the segregated South to the post-war boom in the integrated North, showing how, along the road to what seemed like prosperity and progress, middle-class blacks actually lost their roots to the traditional black world while never achieving acknowledgment from the white sector. The result, concluded Frazier, is an anomalous bourgeois class with no identity, built on self-sustaining myths of black business and society, silently undermined by a collective, debilitating inferiority complex. To read Black Bourgeooisie today is not only to experience one of the most important studies of African American life but also to realize how controversial and relevent Frazier's revelations and challenges remain. -- from back cover.
Notes: 1962 ed has new preface.

Includes bibliographical references.