From the turn of the century until the race riots of 1968, Washington contained the largest black professional community in the United States. This summer the New York Times ran a devastating three-part series on the city of Washington that confirmed what those who live there already know: the District, particularly in its predominantly black areas, “is falling apart.” Dramatic though it is, this decline is a relatively recent phenomenon. Franklin Frazier’s hometown, Washington, D.C. And this group existed in the center of E. This black aristocracy built a nearly self-contained society outside the white world and with limited white assistance. For nearly a century, a community of successful black businessmen, clergy, and educators flourished in America. As a consequence, the history of black success in America often is presented as the success of isolated individuals, of specially gifted men and women who rose to achievement alone despite tremendous obstacles. Claims to the contrary, writes Frazier, constitute a call to racial separatism spread by unscrupulous black businessmen in the hope “that they will have the monopoly of the Negro market.”įrazier’s analysis, controversial when it first appeared, has come to be accepted by many historians as at least approximately true. In Black Bourgeoisie, the classic study of the black middle class, Frazier argues that at no time have American blacks ever created a thriving business community. The notion that blacks have ever succeeded on a large scale in business is a “social myth,” declared Howard University sociologist E.
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