I’m watching a fictional program taking place in 1966. It shows a news report referring to "blacks"and “black” businesses.
I was around in 1966, and even though I was only eight years old, I was very aware of the civil rights movement due to my family situation. Even so, I cannot recall at what point the verbiage switched from Negro to black. But 1966 strikes me as early. Googling was not helpful.
Does anyone know for sure?
Looking at newspaper stories with those adjectives applied to e.g. “-owned businesses,” “voters,” “soldiers,” etc. shows an identical peak for “Negro” in the mid-60s with “Black” having almost completely displaced it by the early 70s. You can see this on, say, Google’s Ngram viewer also. It may not have become formalized in style-guides until the early 70s, but it would not have been ahistoric (depending on the media) in 1966, either, i.e. the Boston Globe speaks that year of
…the old dreams of education and independent black businesses
and the New York Times of
white businessmen and shopkeepers in the country’s black neighborhoods
—without further commentary on the term, although both papers were still using “Negro” (capitalized in the Times) at that time.
Here’s an abstract that might help:
In 1968, “negro” hadn’t yet shifted all the way to “black” in spoken language in Washington, DC. I remember some hesitation about “black” because it had had a negative connotation.
Thank you!
And there was a transition period where the term “Afro-American” was popular. Google n-grams shows a large jump from 1965-1973, and then usage leveled off.
And, then, “African American” became commonly used in the 1990s and 2000s. My understanding is that, in recent years, “Black” has come back into favor, at least in part because not all who identify as Black also identify as African American (because their heritage/background is not from the U.S.).
I recognize that it’s probably much more nuanced than that, as well, and seems to come down to individual preference and identification.
No I don’t know but George Carlin used to do bit on it.
I saw a speech(or parts of it) by LBJ where he used “Negro”. It was about the civil rights movement and the riots taking place.
I don’t know the year but he was president and he was making an address about it on TV.
It was on a documentary I watched recently.
United Negro College Fund
I remember when Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991. He was asked at his retirement press conference if president Bush should appoint a minority. He said race shouldn’t be an excuse. An excuse for what asked a reporter. “Doing wrong. I mean for picking the wrong Negro and saying “I’m picking him because he is a Negro”. Always sounds strange to me. From another era
Years ago I read a novel set in an alternate history version of 1972 where the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated to a brief nuclear exchange and the US is slowly recovering, but is still largely under martial law with British troops serving as law enforcement and humanitarian forces in much of the country. There’s a scene where a British reporter refers to an American general giving a press conference as a Negro, and the general responds “We don’t really say that here anymore, I prefer Black (capitalized) or Afro-American.”
So there’s at least one data point that suggests that phrase was briefly popular around then, in the alternate timeline at least but probably also in our own.
In my observation it mostly came back into style in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and the revitalization of the BLM movement. There’s similarly been a push among journalists to capitalize “White” as the standard, but as a white guy that personally makes me uncomfortable since previously the only people I’ve seen capitalize it are militant white supremacists and I don’t like getting lumped in with them.
The book “Black Like Me” came out in 1961, and the movie of it just three years later.
The Stephen Foster song “Old Black Joe” was published in 1860.
That was a very interesting article. It missed one point, however. While it explored the choice of “black” as a label within the community, it did not seem to provide an answer to a question of how the term was adopted by the majority white press.
I recall reading the editorials and op-ed pieces that appeared in the major newspapers and recall the argument being put forth to them that while the term “white” was used as a common noun without capitalization, the term “Negro” seemed to set apart that population as a subject for scientific examination and, to bring both groups onto an equal footing, the term “black” without capitalization was preferable.
The discussions in Ebony are important, but it took the changes in the Chicago Manual of Style, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc., to make that usage general.
The Comedy Central New Negroes premiered in 2019. Clearly 100% a reference to the Harlem Renaissance, though; I do not imagine they were trying to be intentionally provocative.