Back to Black: Naming and Necessity
Exactly what to call black people has been contested for the entirety of American history. Racial labels have changed with each passing generation, and people still using older terms are often considered at best racially insensitive and at worst outright racist.
The history of these racial labels doesn’t appear to be all that well known, and so I’m going to try and shed some light by giving an extended tour of the major terms. I’ll be covering where they came from, how they got popular, and, for the older terms, how they fell out of favour.
Note: I’ll only be covering the main American and English terms that were socially acceptable at some point.
Let’s begin by establishing a simple timeline for terms used in the U.S. census:
All the terms I’ll be covering have been in use at some point between 1776 and 2000. There’s one section per term, broadly ordered chronologically based on when each one was popularised.
African
Some of the first institutions organised by Americans of African heritage had names such as the First African Baptist Church (1773), the Free African Society (1787), and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816). The articles of association for the Free African Society began: “We, the Free Africans and their descendants of the City of Philadelphia in the State of Pennsylvania or elsewhere” (Bennett Jr. et al., 1969, p. 402).
In 1816 Robert Finley, an American clergyman and educator, founded the American Colonization Society (then called The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America), whose purpose was to encourage and support the migration of free Americans of African descent “back” to Africa. How helpful!
As a direct response to the American Colonization Society’s increasing influence, the black community appears to have abandoned African as a term of reference. In 1835, during the Fifth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States in Philadelphia, a motion was adopted that stated (“FPC Minutes”, 1835):
That we recommend as far as possible, to our people to abandon the use of the word “colored”, when either speaking or writing concerning themselves; and especially to remove the title African from their institutions, the marbles of churches &c.
Despite this, there was strong resistance to coloured being dropped as a term (see next section). African did indeed start being phased out during this period, although there were still several organisations founded after this point whose name used the term — such as the African School Association.
Freedman
Just after the American Civil War, the word Freedman became briefly popular. Several organisations adopted the term, such as the Freedmen’s Hospital, the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Freedmen’s Aid Society (Miller, 1937).
There’s not much in the way of records concerning its use, but it appears to have dropped out of usage after the Reconstruction era.
Coloured/Colored
Coloured was in use since long before the start of our timeline and became the dominant choice during the 19th century. These days it’s considered offensive, with the rationale usually given being that Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation between the 1870s and 1960s caused negative associations with the term, thus leading to it becoming seen as racist (Butterfly, 2015). However, the history appears to be far more complex than this.
There was disagreement on the appropriateness of “colored” as far back as 1835, with some advocating for substitute terms such as “oppressed Americans” (Bennett Jr. et al., 1969, p. 403). Louder voices were in favour of the term, notably Samuel Cornish, the editor of The Colored American, who in 1838 wrote an editorial entitled Our Brethren in Philadelphia in which he said:
Oppressed Americans! who are they? non-sense brethren!! You are COLORED AMERICANS. The Indians are RED AMERICANS, and the white people are WHITE AMERICANS and you are as good as they; and they are no better than you — God made all of the same blood. Do not fool away any more of your time nor fill up any more of your papers, with SUCH NONSENSE.
The maiden issue of The Coloured American contained an editorial explaining the rationale for its name, in which it stated (Stuckey, 2013, p. 235):
We are written about, preached to, and prayed for, as Negroes, Africans, and blacks, all of which have been stereotyped, as names of reproach, and on that account, if no other, are unacceptable. Let us and our friends unite, in baptizing the term “Colored Americans,” and henceforth let us be written of, preached of, and prayed for as such. It is the true term, and one which is above reproach
Unfortunately Mr Cornish never lived to see quite the extent to which reproachment was coming.
One of the last organisations to use “Colored” in its title was The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was founded in 1909. Whereas they usually go only by NAACP these days, as of 2008, at least, don’t consider the word coloured to be offensive. That year, Lindsay Lohan called Barack Obama the first coloured president, and in response, the NAACP’s Washington DC communications director Carla Sims said the following in an interview with Mercury News:
There’s really no problem with what she said… In her excitement, she was acknowledging that color was not a barrier in the populace choosing Obama. The term ‘colored’ is not derogatory. They chose the word ‘colored’ because it was the most positive description commonly used at that time. It’s outdated and antiquated, but not offensive.
However, lots of black people do find it offensive; for example this piece for the Chicago Tribune, where the author chastises white people for not knowing their black history, before pointing them to a recommended reading list compiled by a white woman.
The word coloured was already starting to be supplanted by the start of the 20th century, and the 1916 Negro Year Book observed: “There is an increasing use of the word ‘Negro’ and a decreasing use of the words ‘colored’ and ‘Afro-American’ to designate us as a people” (Work, 1915).
In 1919 W. A. Domingo, editor of the Negro World, wrote an article for The Messenger entitled “What are We, Negroes or Colored People?” in which he summarised his thoughts on “colored” with (Domingo, 1919):
To sum up; the word “colored” is objectionable because, first, it is philologically weak; second, it is ethnologically inexact; third, its origin is not pleasant; fourth, it tends towards division inside the “race”; fifth, it has comparatively no history; sixth, it cannot be capitalized; seventh, it is a makeshift.
If only people still wrote like that. Despite such strong rhetoric, self-identification doesn’t appear to have shifted until much later. In 1937, the Afro-American chain of newspapers conducted a poll of its readers about their preferred racial designation, and nearly twice as many people chose “colored” over Negro (1590 vs 893). Others rejected both, preferring terms such as African, Ethiopian, Afro-America, or “just plain American” (Cuddy-Keane, 2014, p. 147).
Respondents gave various reasons for their choice. John F. Speller of Philadelphia preferred Negro, since it: “represents a definite anthropological type” bestowing “a heritage of tradition and of ancient culture of which [the American Negro] should be duly proud”, whereas Miss Louise Williams of Philadelphia rejected Negro because: “it is so often associated with the word ‘n — — ,’” (Cuddy-Keane, 2014, p. 147).
Mulatto/Quadroon/Octoroon
The U.S. Census formerly had several designations to designate multiracial people by how fractionally black they were. You read that right.
Mulatto comes from the Spanish, literally translated as “young mule”. Its first use in English is unclear, but its use in America appears to predate the founding of the United States. In 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a privateer named Daniel Elfrith attacked the Portuguese slave ship the San Juan Bautista, and brought “20. and odd Negroes” to Jamestown, in what is the first recorded case of black slaves being sold in the Thirteen Colonies (Sluiter, 1997; Newby-Alexander, 2019).
In 1632, Elrifth’s employers, the London Company, wrote to him to: “condemn his indiscretion in too freely entertaining a Mulletto”, although did not punish him (Brown, 1890).
In 1850, Mulatto was first introduced in the U.S. census, as: “a term for someone with one black and one white parent that became sort of a catch-all for anyone perceived as racially ambiguous, including many Native Americans” (Donnella, 2016).
In the 1870 census, the definition for mulatto specifically mentions it including: “quadroons, octoroons and all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood” (Parker et al., 2016). However, in the 1890 census instructions “quadroon” and “octoroon” were promoted to their own categories, with mulatto defined as someone with “three-eighths to five-eighths black blood,” quadroon “one-fourth black blood” and an octoroon “one-eighth or any trace of black blood”.
In a rare moment of clarity, a report composed after the 1890 census concluded that quadroon and octoroon provided little value and the designations were dropped (Wang, 2017). Mulatto was also dropped for the 1900 census, but the U.S. government decided to bring it back for a farewell tour in 1910 and again in 1920.
Half-Caste/Mixed Race
Whereas the U.S. had multiple designations of racial purity, the British Empire opted for a single term: half-caste. Caste comes from the Latin “castus” meaning pure, making half-caste mean “half pure”. Charming.
In the 1940s, social anthropologist Kenneth Little interviewed mixed race people in Cardiff and found: “The term ‘half-caste’ is the name in general use by the outsider. It is as well to note, however, that it is rarely if ever used within the community, and is very unpopular among the young people concerned, who usually prefer to be referred to as ‘coloured’” (Aspinall, 2013).
Despite its unpopularity among the community, it was in common use in the UK right up until the 1990s. The Massive Attack song Five Man Army from their 1991 Blue Lines album contains the line: “so whether you’re black, white, or half-caste in your complexion”, which is presumably meant to express that their music is inclusive and for everyone, and not that they’re huge fans of colonial ideas about racial purity.
I’m mixed race, and when I was in school half-caste was the regular term used. I recall taking no offence to it right up until GCSEs where, as part of English class, we studied a poetry anthology that included a poem called Half-Caste by John Agard (first published in 2005). The following extract has always stuck with me:
Ah listening to yu wid de keen
Half of mih ear
Ah looking at u wid de keen
Half of mih eye
And when I’m introduced to yu
I’m sure you’ll understand
Why I offer yu half-a-hand
An when I sleep at night
I close half-a-eye
Consequently when I dream
I dream half-a-dream
An when moon begin to glow
I half-caste human being
Cast half-a-shadow
Mixed race is currently the standard term with, as of 2006, most people surveyed identifying as mixed race as opposed to other equivalent terms, such as multiracial or dual heritage (Aspinall et al., 2008).
Negro
Negro has a colonial history, being is a derivative of the Spanish and Portuguese word negro, which means black. Its first use when referring to skin colour appears to have been in the middle of the 15th century when the Portuguese first arrived in Southern Africa. Spanish and Portuguese slave traders later adopted negro to designate slaves of African descent.
In 1735, physician and botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, in which he divided humans into four varieties. In 1779, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a physiologist, anthropologist, and a fan of Linneaus’s work, was studying human skulls and used Linnaeus’s system as the basis of his own categorisation system. He classified the skulls into 5 races, each initially denoted by a colour, but by 1795 had also been given names: Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), Malayan (brown), Ethiopian (black), and American (red) (Gould, 1994). A racist colour-coding that persists to this day.
Blumenbach was part of a group of historians located in the University of Göttingen who called themselves the Göttingen School of History. During the 1780s the group divided humanity into three main races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid (renamed from Ethiopian). This group were instrumental in starting the field of scientific racism, which sadly still persists today. For an overview of this topic, I highly recommend Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini.
This grouping legitimatised Negroid and by proxy Negro as a term, and over the next 150 years, they became socially acceptable terms used by all. By 1900 the three groupings were popular enough they were included in influential German encyclopedia Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, and by 1911 also included in the 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
Negro was also first used as a classification for the 1900 U.S. Census and indeed has been used in some capacity by the Census Bureau right the way through to the 2010 census. The reason it lasted so long was, according to the Census Bureau director, that:
there was an older cohort of African-Americans who self-identified as “Negro.” Surprisingly, about 56,000 persons took the time to write in under the “some other race” category the word “Negro.” Above half of them were less than 45 years of age in 2000.
The push to replace “coloured” with “Negro” started in the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War. Blanche Kelso Bruce (1841–1898), the first black man to serve a full term as a U.S. Senator, famously refused to use the word “colored”, saying: “I am a Negro, and proud of my race” (Lane, 1965).
In 1895, Booker T. Washington gave his Atlanta Exposition Speech, which used “Negro” but not “coloured”. Organisations also started to include Negro in their names, such as the American Negro Academy (1897), and the National Negro Business League (1900), which was founded by Booker T. Washington himself. He also published A New Negro for a New Century that same year.
In 1915 W. E. B. Du Bois published a book called The Negro, and around 1918 the Harlem Renaissance began (then called the New Negro Movement), thus popularising the term New Negro. This New Negro was formulated as more outspoken, radical, and resolute in the face of Jim Crow segregation vs the Old Negro, as illustrated by this cartoon published in The Messenger in 1919 (Gates, 1988):
There was also a concerted effort to capitalise the N in Negro. In an 1878 issue of The Chicago Conservator, an editorial entitled “Spell It with a Capital” was featured (Grant & Grant, 1975). In 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois included an infamous footnote on the first page of the first chapter of his book, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study: “I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter”. He also conducted an extensive letter-writing campaign, lobbying various publications to adopt the capitalisation; however, it wasn’t widely adopted until the NAACP launched a pressure campaign in 1929.
But not everyone was a proponent of capitalisation. In 1930, George S. Schuyler memorably wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier (Mencken, 1944):
It really doesn't matter a tinker's damn whether Negro is spelled with a small or large N, so far as the Negro's economic, political and cultural status is concerned. The gabble, mostly senseless, to the contrary has vastly amused me; for, if anything, it is worse to spell Negro with a large N than with a small one, and if I had my way I would discontinue it…
There were also dissenters for adopting Negro in general, with sustained disapproval of the term during the entire period of its use. For example, in March 1928, The Crisis published an exchange between Roland A. Barton, a high school student, and W. E. B. Du Bois, where Roland complained that (Bennett Jr. et al., 1969, p. 406):
The most piercing thing that hurts me in this February CRISIS, which forced me to write, was the notice that called the natives of Africa, “Negroes,” instead of calling “Africans,” or “natives.”
The word, “Negro,” or “n — — ,” is a white man’s word to make us feel inferior. I hope to be a worker for my race, that is why I wrote this letter. I hope that by time I become a man, that this word, “Negro,” will be abolished.
To which Du Bois responded, in part, by saying that:
“Negro” is a fine word. Etymologically and phonetically it is much better and more logical than “African” or “colored” or any of the various hyphenated circumlocutions.
In 1937, Dr Kelly Miller summarised the difficulty of replacing terms (Miller, 1937):
Language is determined by the people who speak and write it most influentially. The leading newspapers, magazines, text books and literature in general use the word “Negroes” when applied to a well known and well understood group. Practically every colored writer and speaker of note and distinction freely uses the term "Negro." Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, Prof. Benjamin G. Brawley and Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune fall in this category. There is no corresponding number of writers and speakers of like renown who deliberately repudiate its use. As long as this is the case, the ineffectual advocates of a satisfactory substitute for the word "Negro" will have to wait until they gain the ascendancy in our written and spoken language.
Negro would remain unchallenged as a common term for the whole of the 1940s and 1950s, although new organisations completely abandoned the term during the 1950s (Smith 1992, p. 500):
In 1960, Richard Moore, a civil rights activist, writer, and prominent socialist, published an influential book entitled The Name “Negro”: Its Origin and Evil Use, in which as well as advocating for the term “African American”, he also stated:
The name “Negro” has been so thoroughly suffused with the stench of the slave pen, and has become so saturated with shame, racist inferiority, and foul corruption, that it can neither be cleansed nor deodorized in any foreseeable time. Hence, the term “Negro” must be completely cast off and its further use wholly rejected.
In November 1967, Ebony magazine published an influential piece entitled “What’s in a name: Negro vs. Afro-American vs. Black” by Lerone Bennett Jr., which resulted in the following letters to the editor on their January 1968 issue (Bennett Jr., 1967; Ebony, 1968):
This marked the beginning of the end for Negro is a common term. As we’ll see later, within 10 years it would be completed supplanted by the term black.
Afro-American
The precursor to African American, Afro-American is first documented as having been in use in 1831 but wasn’t popularised until the 1880s through T. Thomas Fortune and his newspaper, the New York Age (Mencken, 1944).
Afro-American also itself had a precursor in the form of “Africo-American”, which is first documented in “A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, in the United States”, published in 1817. Africo-Amerian never saw widespread adoption, and its main flag-bearer was the Africo-American Presbyterian newspaper, which was published between 1879 and 1938.
From the late 1880s through to the early 1900s, Afro-American rivalled Negro in terms of popularity (Stuckey, 2013, p. 269). Several black organisations incorporated the term, such as the National Afro-American Council and the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper. However, it was eventually supplanted by Negro, and only became popular again briefly in the 1960s.
Malcolm X preferred the term Afro-American, dismissing Negro as “so-called Negro” and founding the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964 — the year before his assassination (Martin, 1991, p. 93). Academia also preferred the term, with Afro-American Studies departments opening in Harvard, Howard, and Stanford during the late 1960s.
In July 1967, the Detroit Federation of Teachers hosted the Racism in Education conference delegates unanimously endorsed a resolution that called on all educators, persons, and organizations to abandon the “slavery-imposed name Negro” for the terms “African-American” or “Afro-American” (Bennett Jr. et al., 1969, p. 400).
Afro-American also inspired the name of the “Afro” hairstyle (Sherrow, 2006). The Black Panthers favoured Afros due to: “a new awareness among black people that their own natural physical appearance is beautiful and is pleasing to them” (Wheeler, 2017).
In 1970, Angela Davis became a fugitive when she fled California following her arrest for suspected involvement in a shootout with the police. She was listed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitive” list, with her wanted poster being widely viewed, and being a lot of white American’s first experience seeing such a hairstyle (Wheeler, 2017):
In 1973, Carl T. Rowan published an infamous piece for his syndicated column for the Chicago-Sun Times entitled “Brothers and Sisters, ‘Hair’ ain’t where it’s at”. In it, he excoriates young black people, saying:
But it’s time blacks — especially young blacks — stopped deluding themselves into believing that the sheepish following of stupid fads is “black solidarity.” It is time to stop swallowing this malarkey that styling your hair in 30 nappy plaits, with enough head skin showing to cane-bottom granny’s rocker, is the epitome of “pride in racial heritage.”
And:
Let’s face reality: we don’t have enough fire power to take this country; we don’t have enough manpower to dominate it; we don’t have enough dollar-power to buy it. And we’ll be short of all these “powers” until we develop a lot more brainpower. In truth, that’s the one power we can develop rapidly, with zeal, without scaring the dominant group to the point that it loads on new oppressions.
While never as popular as Negro, Afro-American fell out of usage entirely in the 1970s. Sociologist Doris Wilkinson summed up its brief popularity by saying (Wilkinson, 1990):
In retrospect, it may appear ironic that in the 1960s, Americans of African ancestry did not declare themselves as either African or Afro-Americans. Instead, greater willingness was voiced to assign the label Afro to fashions rather than to a people.
Black
Whereas “black” has always been a term associated with people of African descent, for obvious reasons, its path to becoming the foremost socially acceptable term didn’t begin until the 1960s.
On January 28, 1962, 24-year-old photojournalist Kwame Brathwaite staged the Naturally ’62 beauty pageant in the Purple Manor nightclub in Harlem. The show featured exclusively black models, sporting Afrocentric designs and natural hairstyles, alongside performances by Jazz musicians (Nnadi, 2018). The show was a wild success, popularising the “Black is Beautiful” slogan used on its flyers and birthing a movement of the same name.
On June 16, 1966, 24-year-old civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael was arrested for trespassing on public property at Stone Street Negro Elementary School in Greenwood, Mississippi. He was there setting up camp as part of the 21-day 270-mile March Against Fear demonstration. He was held by the police for several hours, and upon being released rejoined marchers at a local park for a night-time rally, where he delivered a speech saying:
This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!
To which the crowd roared back “BLACK POWER!”, thus introducing a slogan and naming a movement which was to sweep America.
The immediate reception from civil rights leaders and the media was decidedly lukewarm. In an interview a few days later, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. said:
It is absolutely necessary for the Negro to gain power, but the term ‘black power’ is unfortunate because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism
And Roy Wilkins, then head of the NAACP, gave an address at the NAACP’s annual conference, where he denounced the term, saying: “No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term ‘Black Power’ means anti-white power”, “it is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan”, and “it is the ranging of race against race on the irrelevant basis of skin color. It is the father of hatred and the mother of violence”.
Mainstream conservative newspaper The Detroit News ran a series of hysterical headlines in July 1966:
Some pro-Negro advocates also claimed that: “the whole black issue was raised by a handful of intellectuals, none of whom are black, except for their beards” (Bennett Jr. et al., 1969, p. 401).
Despite strong opposition from the “old guard” civil rights activists, Black Power and more radical activism were on the rise, galvanised in part by the assassination of Malcolm X a year earlier. The Black Panther Party was founded just four months after Carmichael’s speech, and Fred Hampton giving his famous I Am A Revolutionary speech within a couple of years. This new, radical, movement was reminiscent of the New Negro movement 40 years earlier.
Both Dr King and Roy Wilkins were heckled and denounced for continuing to use the word “Negro” (Leo, 1968). Even before Carmichael’s speech, Detroit based revolutionary socialists the League of Revolutionary Black Workers had already published an attack on them, and other civil rights activists, in the form of an “Uncle Tom” chart:
In July 1967, the first Black Power conference was held with over 1000 delegates attending, and in October Charles V. Hamilton published Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, in which he argued:
There is a growing resentment of the word “Negro,” for example, because this term is the invention of our oppressor; it is his image of us that he describes. Many blacks are now calling themselves African-Americans, Afro-Americans or black people because that is our image of ourselves.
In August 1968, James Brown released “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud”, which spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard R&B singles chart and further cemented “black” as an identity.
In a Gallup Poll conducted in May 1968, 69% of respondents said they favoured Negro, 15% Afro-American, and only 6% black. However, in a Gallup Poll conducted one year later in May 1969, the number favouring Negro had fallen to 38% and black has risen to 19% (Martin, 1991, p. 94). By the early 1970s, the majority favoured black, which would remain the preferred term until the 1990s (Smith 1992, p. 504):
Organisations moved a bit slower, with major media publications including the Associated Press and The New York Times stopping using Negro during the 1970s, and by the 1980s, even slow-moving institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court had largely stopped using it (Palmer, 2010).
Whereas during the 1970s it became socially acceptable for people to identify as black, objects weren’t so lucky. When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. opened in 1982, featuring a black granite wall engraved with the names of service members who had died, the reception was mixed, to say the least. Tom Carhart, a member of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, famously dismissed it as a “black gash of shame”, explaining that black is: “the universal color of sorrow and shame and degradation in all races, all societies worldwide”. He later lamented that: “in a city filled with white monuments, this is our reward for faithful service”, before adding: “we seek only to be accepted in our society” (Hess, 1987; U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 1981). It is unclear whether Mr Carhart ever did find acceptance as a white man in America.
African American
The first recorded use of African American was in 1782, in a 16-page pamphlet entitled A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis, whose author attributed themselves as an “African American” (American, 1782).
Precisely when previous terms like “colored” and “Negro” were popularised is inexact, as there was no single inflexion point. Even with “black”, it’s unclear precisely when the leap was made from “Black Power” to identifying as Black. But for African American, we can pinpoint its rise down to an exact date: December 19th, 1988.
That’s because, on that day, 75 national leaders of black groups met to discuss the “National Black Agenda”, following which said leaders held a press conference to announce that members of their race would prefer to be called “African Americans” rather than “blacks” (Martin, 1991, p. 83).
During that press conference Reverend Jesse Jackson, who at the time was the spokesman for the National Urban Coalition, gave the reasoning as follows (Associated Press, 1988):
Just as we were called colored, but were not that, and then Negro, but [were] not that, to be called black is just as baseless. To be called African-American has cultural integrity. It puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit a level of cultural maturity. There are Armenian Americans and Jewish Americans and Arab-Americans and Italian-Americans. And with a degree of accepted and reasonable pride, they connect their heritage to their mother country and where they are now.
Despite 75 group leaders united behind this change, there were still notable dissenters, including Reverend B. Herbert Martin who commented: “We must have really reached a zenith in the civil rights struggle that we have to now busy ourselves with semantics”.
C. Hutherson, in a letter to the Chicago Sun-Times, was similarly unimpressed, writing (Chicago Sun-Times, 1988):
Regarding the proposal by some blacks for all blacks to be called African Americans: when did they take a vote on what blacks wanted to be called? They must have done it while I was asleep. Jesse Jackson and other black leaders have a lot of nerve speaking for all blacks.
And Lawrence Hanks, chairman of the political science department of Tuskegee University, wrote to his local newspaper (Leroux, 1992):
The leaders of this movement are worrying about whether to call our feathered food ‘chicken’ or ‘poultry’ while the fox is running it around the hen house
Among black leaders, views were largely confined to approval or apathy. In July 1989, Ebony magazine ran a piece entitled “African-American or Black: What’s in a name?”, where some prominent “Blacks and/or African-Americans” expressed their views, which included (Ebony, 1989):
I’m willing to be called a Martian as long as I’m given economic equity and a real opportunity to expand —Gloria Naylor, Novelist
I reject the debate. I choose to direct my interests and energies toward resisting the assault on our efforts to achieve economic justice — Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, President, Southern Christian Leadership Conference
In the present discourse, we [the NAACP] have taken the position that we will neither oppose nor endorse the term ‘African-American’. This does not indicate a lack of concern [about the issue], but rather an abiding respect for the sound judgement of our people, who, on their own, will reach consensus [about what to be called], just as they have done in the past — Dr Benjamin L. Hooks, Executive Director, NAACP
Dr Hooks’s statement, in particular, is quite the departure from his predecessor, Roy Wilkins, who publicly denounced Black Power as a term 20 years prior.
Dr Ramona Edelin, president of the National Urban Coalition, also commented, specifically weighing on the potential for a fracture, stating: “There were bitter battles when we went from ‘Negro’ to ‘black’. We don’t want that this time”.
The similarity between African American and its precursor Afro-American was also noted at the time, with Dr Olive Taylor, a professor of history at Howard University, explaining that: “We came from Africa, we didn’t come from Afro” (Wilkerson, 1989). I guess you could say we didn’t come from Afro; Afro came from us.
Gallup has conducted regular polls on “African American” vs “black” as preferred terms since 1991, and whereas “African-American” has a slight preference overall, since 2013 the two terms have been at almost identical levels of support:
Person of Colour/Person of Color/POC
The phrase “people of color” comes from the 18th century “gens de couleur,” a French designation for mixed race colonial subjects (Kim, 2020). The first documented use of the term “person of color” in the U.S. is in the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, signed in 1807. The act applied to “any negro, mulatto, or person of colour”.
The term only started gaining prominence in the late 1980s, although in 1966 Dr King referred to “citizens of color” in his speech at the March on Washington (Safire, 1988).
In 1977 at a national women’s conference, “women of color” was negotiated as a “solidarity definition”, when women who were neither black nor white asked to be included in a “Black Women’s Agenda”. “People of color” was subsequently popularised as a substitute for “minority” (Kim, 2020).
The fact “coloured people” is considered unacceptable whereas “people of colour” is considered fine, has been joked about since at least 1988:
Person of colour is interesting as a construction, as usually when we use “person of”, what follows is an abstract noun e.g. person of faith, person of interest, person of status. But colour isn’t an abstract noun, making it a peculiar choice, given that replacing it with an actual colour would not be considered socially acceptable i.e. person of black.
These days person of colour is used to denote non-white people and is often abbreviated to the initialism “POC” (pronounced pee-oh-see). The acronym BIPOC (pronounced buy pock), refers to “black, indigenous, (and) people of colour” and first appeared around 2013 as a more inclusive alternative to POC (Garcia, 2020).
Despite being widely accepted in the U.S., there are still dissenters who find the term problematic. Amina Mire, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University, says that: “It suggests that whiteness is not a colour. In my work, I often use ‘non-white people’ instead of ‘people of colour’”.
There’s also tension regarding what extent the term should be used for black people, and similarly using “people of colour” to refer to a group of exclusively black people (Hampton, 2019; Parham, 2019).
Back to Black
The term black was again thrust into the political spotlight in 2016, and then more prominently in the Summer of 2020, due to the Black Lives Matter movement. Much like Negro before it in the 1930s, Black is now being treated like an identity and a proper noun, with several major publications updating their style guides to capitalise it.
Despite much opposition to its use, over the entirety of our timeline, it appears the term is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
African American is still used, especially in more formal contexts such as academia, and person of colour is still used when referring to non-white people or groups that aren’t exclusively black.
Looking back over our timeline, apart from “African” and the mixed race terms, it appears that all the socially acceptable terms gained popularity, in part, due to advocacy on the part of black leaders. Samuel Cornish, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), and Jesse Jackson all personally advocated for their preferred terms.
At various points there also existed a generational divide, with young activists preferring a new term, and old leaders emphasising caution and reluctance to change. And terms that were hard-won by the black community were readily dismissed by later generations as being offensive and given to them by the “white man”. Negro, for example, had many strong advocates who were proud to make it a core part of their identity. To so easily dismiss it as merely a racist epithet, after their deaths, feels insulting to their legacy.
The prominence of the terms African American and Black highlights differences in how the black community perceives its own identity. On one side is the desire to build an identity based on heritage, not on skin colour. On the other is a desire to focus on the liberation of people oppressed by a racist system. Which side is most represented changes, swinging from one side to the other like a pendulum from each decade to the next. Currently, the focus is on oppression and changing the system, and the rallying cry is Black Lives Matter. But it’s not clear what that means for Black identity, for African American identity, or indeed for any shared identity of people of colour, not all of whom have a connection to either Africa or slavery.
What is clear is the black community is not, and has never been, a monolith. Identity is messy. People (of colour) have different perceptions and expectations, and it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to agree on something so fundamental. At every step along our timeline, there have been strong voices arguing all sides. And so, it is reasonable to assume that, if nothing else, that trend will continue through future decades.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank John Mark Ockerbloom of Online Books Page for kindly helping me locate the Miller 1937 paper, which was invaluable for the Negro section. It formerly wasn’t available online, but as it’s in the public domain I have uploaded it to the Internet Archive here.
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