ORIGINS OF RESEARCHERS ON BLACK AMERICANS.

There are several reasons to believe that white southerners have not been active in research on topics about black Americans. Blacks themselves have certainly not been accepted with open arms when calling attention to problems of blacks. For example, in 1927, E. Franklin Frazier, a writer wrote an article in which he used an analogy comparing the mental processes of racially prejudiced persons with insane persons. Subsequently, he was chased out of Atlanta, Georgia. A study was conducted on origins of researchers on Black Americans. One of the most interesting findings is that obtaining the highest college degree in a southern state of the U.S. does not produce as much of a tendency to study blacks as do childhood socialization or institutional affiliation in the South. One hypothesis is that graduate programs neutralize a tendency to deal with blacks that other socially connected experiences seem to enhance. What seems more likely is that the restrictive social climate of the South may be responsible for the relatively meager opportunities for academic specialization at the research level in southern graduate schools. It is likely, however, that the long trend is reversing. Southern sociologists, who have been criticized for not doing enough research on blacks, have actually been doing proportionately more research in this field than in other fields as compared with their northern, including western counterparts.