Just for grins, I looked up how many Washingtons have played Major League Baseball. During the years of segregation, there was only one–George Washington, a thoroughly obscure outfielder for the 1930’s White Sox.
During the 1970’s, there was a spate of Washingtons–Claudell, Herb (Charlie Finley’s pinch-runner), Ron (who now manages the Rangers), LaRue, and U.L.–all of whom were black.
After that there were no more Washingtons until Enrico Aliceno Washington, who was called up for a cup of coffee with the Cardinals last year. He was born in Georgia and appears to be African American; I’m not sure whether he has any Hispanic blood or whether his parents just liked Latin names. According to Wikipedia he is now playing in China.
Huh? I don’t get it.
Another data point for the OP. I looked at the wikipedia list of notable Washingtons, and besides relatives of George, the only white one on the list of 28 names is Ned, the Disney lyricist who wrote “When You Wish Upon a Star.”
It’s interesting. I never thought of the name as being particularly racially laden, but apparently it is.
Lots of white people in Uruguay are called Washington or Franklin, or so the stereotype goes, I know of at least one case Washington Tabarez, ex DT of Boca Juniors.
My youngest son’s middle name is Washington, because of my admiration for the first President. We’re white. I personally know no white person with that last name.
George Washington was as greatly admired by 19th-century blacks as whites. “With the end of the Civil War, slaves – whose surnames, if they had one, indicated their ownership – were able to choose names of their own. At the time, Washington was probably the best-known and revered name a person could take. The modern legacy of those countless choices is that better than 90 percent of all Americans named Washington [in 2002] are black, according to David Word, a Census Bureau demographer… It is the common American name whose bearer is most likely to be black… The rush to choose the name Washington began even before 1865. When the African American Civil War Memorial, which lists the names of the more than 200,000 United States Colored Troops, was unveiled in Washington, D.C. in 1998, Edwin Washington of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society calculated that 1,885 of those soldiers were named Washington. Nearly half of them were named George Washington. Another 15 were named General Washington.” Tilove, Jonathan, “A lot of Washingtons make black history,” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Feb. 13, 2002), pp. A1, A15.
