"Abram-Lincoln-Harris-Jr." {January 17,1899-November 6,1963}

The grandson of slaves,was the first nationally recognized African American economist.He was the first nationally recognized African American economist.Abram was highly respected for his work that focused primarily on class analysis,African American economic life,and labor illustrate the structural inadequacies of race and racial ideologies. His major published works include The Negro Popoulation in Minneapolis:A Study of Race Relations (1926),The Black Worker:the Negro and and the Labor Movement (1931),and a book co-authored with Sterling D.Spero,,The Negro as Capitalist (1936).His final book,Economics and the Social Reform,appeared in 1958.


Abram was a Marxist scholar and its theories influenced his work.The Black Worker was recognized  as the foundation for future economic histories and assessments of the African American condition.The Negro as Capitalism argued that non-racial economic reforms were the key to solving African American fiscal woes.He also argued capitalism was morally bankrupt and that employing race consciousness as a strategic way to enlighten a public was self-defeating.W.E.B.Du Bois described Abram as one of the "Young Turks" who challenged the then existing historical theories about African American in a capitalist society while insisting upon using modern social scientific methods to further his analyses of African American life.


Born in Richmond,Virginia to parents Abram Lincoln Harris,Sr.,a butcher,and Mary Lee,a teacher,Abram grew up as part of the African American middle class community in Richmond.After high school earned a bachelor of science degree from Virginia Union University in 1922.


After graduation from Virginia Union,Abram enrolled at the New York School of Social Work and worked briefly for the National Urban League (NUL) and the Messenger,the leading African American Socialist newspaper.Abram taught for one year at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute (now West Virginia State University) and then earned an M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1924.He was appointed head of the Department of Economics at Howard University in 1928 and later completed his doctorate in economics from Columbia University in 1930.Abram married his first wife,Callie McGuinn,in 1925 and later divorced in 1955.He married his second wife Phedorah Prescott in 1962.


In the 1940s Abram Harris,along with Edward Franklin Frazier,Allison Davis,and Ralph Bunche,was selected by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal as "insiders"to work on his ground breaking study An American Dilemma which was published in 1944.Toward the end of the 1940s Abram began to retreat from his earlier work,progressive and race politics,and began to concentrate on economic philosophy.


Abram died in Chicago.