That is not what I was getting at. The two can be easily confused but the wording in your first quote made it appear as if this was an intentional move on the part of the UNCF. I apologize if I misinterpreted your words but I still do not see the relevance of your quote.
What I was getting at was that having an acronym which might be confused with UNICEF probably does them no harm in fund-raising terms. And further that this might explain why they keep said name.
Roger, you’re British, and in Hong Kong, right? Take it from an American who was around in the 1960s, “Negro” was the dominant word used by both black and white Americans until about 1968. It was not associated with slavery. “Black” had always been a synonym, but was not considered as polite as “Negro”.
Negro Digest, the black version of Reader’s Digest founded in 1942, did not change its name to Black World until 1970.
Utterly wrong. The discussion to replace Negro with black did not begin before 1967 and was only (somewhat) resolved around 1969.
Claims that King was using “Negro” as an archaic expression (regardless of the rest of his speech patterns) are simply false.
D’oh! :smack:
Malcolm X did found the Organization for Afro-American Unity in 1964, less than a year before he died. So perhaps he’d come to favor that term, but “Afro-American” was new then and it never caught on as far as I know.
No.
According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary “in the late 1950s BLACK began to replace NEGRO and today is the most widely used term.”
Learn something new every day, eh, Tom?
Right, but since they’re trying to give away money, it’s not clear why you have a problem with it. If they think their civil rights mission is best served keeping an old-fashioned name for its name recognition value, wouldn’t it be foolish of them to change it?
It seems to me based on limited recollections of past threads that you have a strong interest in American civil rights issues. It’s a fascinating subject matter, and as a Brit living in Hong Kong I imagine you recognize that you don’t necessarily know much of the context behind it. Forgive me if I assume too much, but you come across sometimes as critical in circumstances in which you don’t have much expertise. Perhaps a more open, investigational approach would be more fruitful.
When the term first arose is irrelevant. You have not yet proven or even given evidence for your point that “negro” was somehow a marked word choice in 1963. The fact that another term had been in use earlier does not prove that “negro” wasn’t the default choice (if you will), the least marked term, in 1963. Your argument seems predicated on some notion that Dr. King was aware that “black” was the wave of the future, which is something that may not have been clear to anyone at that point in time. Even if Dr. King was aware that the term “black” was gaining in popularity - even if he had a time machine and determined beyond all doubt that it would be the current term a decade from then - he might still have made the same choice, in order to use the term most familiar and least marked to his audience at the time.
I should be clearer here. I think roger’s fears that the UNCFwill be confused with UNICEF are unfounded and somewhat bizarre. I didn’t mean to suggest that I believed what he was saying.
There were never any discrete periods when only “colored” was used, then only “Negro” was used, then only “black” was used. The term “black” was used in the 1850s and in the 1950s, simultaneous with “Negro”. But Random House will have to supply some concrete evidence of “black” starting to replace “Negro” in the late 1950s. For example, organizations or periodicals changing their names, or a significant increase in the use of one word over the other by black speakers or writers.
Forgiven. You are young and have the impetuosity of youth. Far better to be guilty of making assumptions now than when you are older. And might I say that your linguistic observations are very promising for one so young. Keep reading, and keep learning.
Now that I think of it, UNICEF probably keeps its old acronym so that people won’t confuse it with the UNCF. Although it was originally called the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund, it is now just the UN Children’s Fund- which would be abbreviated UNCF.
Yep. I have just learned that the the Random House Dictionary has either bad citations or a bad proof editor who allowed “1950s” to get past him or her when “1960s” should have been the entry.
“Black” would have actually been considered insulting in the late 1950s. I was there when the arguments were advanced regarding the use of “black” and I followed those arguments in the editorial and Op-Ed pages of the newspapers of the time.
While there were various early (read “early to mid-1960s”) employments of the word “black” in very specific contexts, the use of “black” to refer to people of African ancestry in the U.S. did not replace “Negro” prior to 1967 at the very earliest. Both “Black Power” and “Black is Beautiful” preceded the change of nomenclature from “Negro” to “black,” (and probably had a strong influence on the change.).
(Earlier uses included the black panther emblem for the Student Non-Viloent Coordinating Committe (1965) and the subsequent Black Panther Party (1966) which took its name for the symbol of the powerful cat, although its earliest publications still referred to people as Negroes, and Malcom X’s musings about a black revolution (1964)–in which, again, he referred to the people who would participate as Negroes. In fact, in the OED, every entry for the Black Panther Party or to “Black Power” discusses the people using the word “Negro” until a speech given by Stokely Carmichael in 1967. Note this article from January, 1967, In Defense of Black Power. Despite the promotion of the (scary for the times) concept of “Black Power” in an avowedly left-wing publication, every reference to the people involved uses the word “Negroes.” The “Black is Beautiful” movement (which contributed to the discussion of the change from “Negro” to “black”) also began subsequent to the 1967 riots of Newark and Detroit.
The original argument put forth was that people of European ancestry were identified by the standard, lower-case color word while people of African ancestry were identified by a “scientific sounding” capitalized word, as though they were specimens to be examined. At the same time, Afro-American and African-American were proposed as possible alternatives. The combining form words were rejected (at that time) as too long and bulky while the lower case word “black” put people on an equal level of recognition as people identified as “white.”
The Random House entry is simply in error.
Just a simple “I was wrong - thanks for the cite” would suffice, Tom.
You are quite welcome to admit that your source had a typo, but I was providing information for those readers who might have been misled by your source’s error. I am really not concerned whether you are capable of recognizing an error from 39 years and 7,000 miles away.
Though the “I have a dream” speech uses “Negro” 15 times, it also uses “black” three times (always in the same sentence as “white”, because I guess contrasting “black” with “white” flows better than “Negro” and “white”, or “Negro” and “Caucasian”). I don’t understand what the OP is looking for; some tidy demarcation before which one term was acceptable, and after which it was taboo and replaced by another? What’s the point?
Sure, the name of the United Negro College Fund uses outdated terminology. And the YMCA doesn’t limit its membership to young Christian men, either. What are you on about?
roger thornhill writes:
> UNCF is going to get confused with UNICEF.
I don’t think anyone has ever confused the United Negro College Fund with UNICEF. I’ve seen many public announcements about the United Negro College Fund, and it’s always called by that full name, not by the initials for the organization, except maybe deep in a fund-raising letter where it’s already clear what’s being talked about. UNICEF is nearly always referred to by its initials. A lot of people who’ve given money to it for years would have to think for a bit to remember what its full name is.
Hmm, I meant to be a tad more offensive than that. Okay, let’s try that again:
roger: your statements in this thread clearly indicate that you are not very familiar with the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. It would behoove you to know what you’re talking about before starting threads like this one, which is clearly an attempt at creating a forum for you to express views on a topic you don’t know much about.
When I said to forgive me if I assume too much, that was only done out of politeness. It really couldn’t be clearer that I was not assuming too much, as I was making the pretty obvious conclusion based upon what you’ve been saying in this thread.
See? Again, he buried you in evidence, roger, but you maintain that one sentence from a dictionary is better proof than everything tomndebb posted. Even after I already demonstrated logically that that one sentence doesn’t support your point very well at all.
Like I said, it would behoove you to be open to thinks you don’t know about. Everyone is ignorant in some areas; you go from “ignorant” to “blithering fool” when you insist upon expounding in a way that emphasizes your ignorance to onlookers.
He is looking, as he has done in the past, for a forum to foist his opinions on the rest of us on an issue that he doesn’t really know anything about.
Can the incoherent be foisted? I thought it just stumbled along blindly, walking into lampposts and such.