This chapter daws on three published sociological works: Franklin E. Frazier’s, Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), Charles S. Johnson’s, Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941), and Charles H. Parrish’s, Color Names and Color Notions (1946). These sociological views on color showed brown identity as an emergent social ideal and image of African America, and in varying degrees drew crucial connections of brownness to values associated with an ascendant middle-class status. These sociologists are presented as racial liberals who offered concrete and critical assessments of the rising idealization of brown complexions among African American youth coming of age between the Great Depression and World War II.
