I was going to email, but apparently it is advised to try the teeming millions first, so here it goes:
When and how did African Americans receive their last names (as in surnames, family names)?
Did slave traders and/or owners give them a last name? Or did they choose or receive a name only when they were freed?
I heard tell they simply received the family name of their (former) owners but I find this hard to believe since I’d expect way more Scottish names among African Americans today (…?). Another thing I stumbled upon was some qoute from Louis Farrakhan or Malcolm X stating that African Americans not changing their last name kept them in slavery by keeping their ‘slave names’.
I noticed that African American names are mostly English and surprisingly generic: I meaan White, Jones, King etc but not Ebdon, Aitkins or Chamberlain. Of course I also noticed names like Jefferson and Washington, but I guess these were given or chosen to honour the famous barers of those names.
I am interested in the origin of family names in general. I guess it has to do with how this connects us to our cultural heritage from way back when. I have a pretty good sense of how this worked for Europeans and Americans of European descent, but not a clue for African Americans. In case you were wondering: I am a white male in Europe and my own family name comes from a respectable trade and can be traced to 17th century Netherlands.
Oh, and I do realize I’m very probably generalizing, so don’t sue me for missing the odd O’Sullivan or MacNeil among African Americans
IIRC, the specifics of the “X” as in Malcolm X was that he believed the surnames were those of previous owners. Most likely the common-ness of names had to do with the common-ness of the names of those who owned slaves. O’Sullivan, for example - “O” is Irish (Mac is Scots, Mc is Irish). By the 1700’s, I suspect that Scots and Irish were not considered “English” and did not therefore move up the economic ladder the way real English did.
Which, admittedly, does not explain this:
An Irish immigrant who owns a giant plantation by middle age must have started with either some serious inherited or married money…
African American last names vary quite a bit. Some came from their slave owners. When the slaves were freed, some kept their slave names and others chose new names. Sometimes they took the name of their occupation. Sometimes they took the name of a famous president or some other prominent person. Some of the names were based on the town they were in. Lots of variety.
In the 20th century, the popularity of the Islamic religion among African Americans prompted many of them to change their names, with Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) being a notable example. Many other African Americans changed their last names to other non-slave names in this time period. Again, some of them chose names of prominent people. I used to work with a man who changed his last name to Burundi, which is an area (and a country these days) in Africa. Many other African Americans have named themselves after tribes or locations in Africa.
You’ll find more French names in African Americans than Irish names like O’Brien. There weren’t too many O’Briens in New Orleans, but there were plenty of French Creole folks there.
The answer to all of the possibilities you propose is yes. Some former slaves retained the name of their former master. Some chose new names for themselves to be inconspicuous. Some chose new names for themselves to honor someone important to either themselves personally or society as a whole. Some probably coined new names for themselves based on their father’s name, or their profession, or their distinguishing features, like the original adoptors of surnames. Some probably even had an oral tradition of their family’s original African name, and reverted to that.
I’m very much ignorant on African American history and culture, but after reading your question I think to a video I saw where James Baldwin (0:00-3:25) talks about the creation of the African American culture/identity/people.
The topic starts from a strange conversation he has with a Londoner from the West Indies, which leads into the history of Baldwin’s last name and links this to the abuses of his ancestors. Baldwin hints that these great abuses might have been prevented if there existed a form of black solidarity/cooperation/culture/identity/etc amongst the disparate enslaved Africans (a parallel could be drawn to Baldwin’s present-day civil rights struggles).
But to rewind, Baldwin uses his own name to introduce these themes and ideas. It’s quite interesting to hear him retale the unique position African Americans have in the American melting pot. Ingrained into the existence of America itself, born out of massive suffering and cultural genocide.
We have attempted to answer this question in its different forms several times before and the answers are complicated because American blacks could get their names from many different sources and change them over time.
For a simple example, about 90% of the people in the U.S. with the last name Washington are black (who only make up about 13% of the total population). The reason for that is fairly simple. George Washington was an even more popular iconic figure during the Civil War and Reconstruction era than today. Freed slaves just adopted it as their own last name in large numbers because it was in fashion at the time. Jefferson was another popular choice.
I grew up in rural Northern Louisiana in an area that is about 40% black in general (they are a majority in the closest cities) with very few other minorities. The vast majority of them have plain English sounding names like Smith, White, Jones and Green. Blacks in Southern Louisiana are much more likely to have French last names. I don’t think most of them really know where their last names came from. My paternal family line had 250+ years of slaveowning history across several Southern states and I have never met a black person with my moderately common English last name so it wasn’t a popular choice for freed slaves to keep but some others were.
From everything I have read, there was no one rule. Some freed slaves kept their former owner’s last names but it wasn’t a general rule. Even if they did, their descendants often changed it again. Many of the more common choices like Smith and Washington seem to be driven by a desire to either blend in as generically as possible or to honor someone that was in vogue at the time.
My mom’s several times great grandfather had slaves in NC at emancipation. One of his former slaves took his entire name, so doing genealogy research got a little complicated right around there. A family of white Owen Ancestorname and black Owen Ancestorname, still living in the same town. It was an Irish surname, to boot.
Just as an example of how names really can come from anywhere, I have a cousin whose husband is Israeli-born, although he also has US citizenship, and would be called “black” by most US people looking at him (if you ask him his ethnicity, he says “Jewish,” though). His mother is an Ethiopian Jew, and his father is a very dark-skinned Sephardic Jew, with curly hair. He has a very Jewish last name. It’s one of the Sephardic names that derives from “Levi.” I don’t want to say exactly what it is, though, for their privacy.
My slave-owning ancestor’s will is on the internet, for some reason. He died in 1801 in Virginia, and his will enumerates a total of 24 “Negroes” to be distributed among various heirs. All of them are simply identified by their first name. I conclude from that they had no legal name, or that any legal name would be that of there master, and therefore not relevant to mention… Where two had the same first name, one was distinguished as “the younger”.
Thanks for shedding some light on this matter guys.
As I feared, there apparently is not one simple answer. I gather that generally speaking Afrcan slaves did not have family names, at least not officially, while slaves. And that they were more or less free to pick one when freed. The (eurocentric) fallacy in my reasoning was that I implicitly supposed there was some clear cut moment the authorities required them to choose a name and stick by it - such as happened in Napoleon dominated continental Europe some time around 1800. This was probably comparable to the procedure for Europeans immigrating to the US at that time.
On a side note: I did search the forum first but this subject didn’t come up…
I know (on Facebook, not personally), an African-American with an Irish-sounding “Mac____” surname. I have wondered how that came about. Perhaps I’ll ask him, if it wouldn’t sound too impertinent.
If I recall the book correctly, he also had some skill (and luck) at cards.
Also, Ellen’s family pressured her into marrying him to get her out of a scandalous relationship with her cousin. They probably made it worth his while financially.
Hmmm… when I google my first name - last name I found that there are half a dozen people with the same name - all black. Yes my surname is in the “top 100 English surnames” but near the bottom of the list.
I wasn’t suggesting that there were no Mac’s or O’s who owned plantations or slaves… Just that plain English seriously outnumbered them in the richer segment of southern society. The large number of Scots names in the Anglo diaspora mainly come from the highland clearances (started about 1815 or so IIRC) and would have been penniless displaced sharecroppers; the biggest Irish wave would have been their abject poor from the potato famine in 1849.
Some of the “English-sounding names” need not be English at all. Green was mentioned in another thread as being a dead giveaway for Jewishness in Ireland, but it’s certainly not an O’Something.
There are many, many people who have no idea where their lastnames came from or mean. Just this week I read an article about a Hispanic businessman by the name of Mr. Palomarez - it’s Palomares in the original spelling (“Dovecotes”; from Palencia) but he somehow ended up with that hypercorrected version which makes my teeth hurt.
I think that surnames were not really needed for slaves in 1801. It wasn’t until they were freed that they needed something other than a first name, and the last name they took then didn’t necessarily have to be that of their former master. At least this is what I gather form shows like Finding Your Roots and Genealogy Roadshow.
There were also a very large number of Scots-Irish (Scottish Presbyterians who moved to, mainly, Ulster in the 1600’s) who migrated to America in the early 1700’s. Many settled in Virginia or the Carolinas. Many ended up in Kentucky, or Indiana etc.
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Michelle Obama née Robinson got her surname from Jim Robinson, a slave on the Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, S.C. who was in his early teens when Lincoln signed the Proclamation. AFAIK, there is no indication how he chose his surname.
It wasn’t particularly common, but it could happen. Thomas Lynch came to America with his father in the 1670s, and by his death, was one of the largest landholders in South Carolina. (His grandson was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.)
Alexander Porter came from County Donegal with his uncle after his father was executed during the Rebellion of 1798, managed to read for the bar, and then, when Louisiana became a state, was a delegate to their constitutional convention, got elected to the legislature, became a state judge, and then Senator from Louisiana, and while he was doing it, managed to build up a sugar plantation called Oaklawn Manor.
Frederick Stanton, who was a physician, came to Natchez and started planting, and by the time he died, owned about 15,000 acres and 444 slaves. He also built a mansion in Natchez which he named Belfast, after his home town.
There was also a Michael O’Reily, another physician, who managed to own a small plantation in Jackson County, Mississippi.