Your cite was in error, Roger. Try to have the grace to acknowledge your own. I can remember “negro” being considered a “polite” word for black people as late as the early 70’s (at least in the deep south). Do you really mean to insinuate that people who were actually…you know…THERE at the time and remember it are all wet and your one erroneous (and ambiguous) citation should be the final word. You got this one wrong, mate. It happens to all of us. Just cop to it and move on.
That Random House cite also says that “Afro-American” is sometimes used, when I have never, ever heard that term used until this thread. It also makes no mention of an actual term currently in use, which is “African American”.
The term “Afro-American” was used in a lot of “Afro-American Studies” departments at universities in the 1970s. Most have since switched the title to “African-American Studies”.
My memory was that “Afro American” was originally coined by a guy named Moore(?) around 1960. When it was offered as a replacement for “Negro” several years later, he objected to the hyphen. There were a number of people who toyed with “Afro-American,” “Afro American,” and “African-American” in the late 1960s, but the argument that (lower-case) “black” was the more equal counterpoint to the common “white” (along with its being shorter as well as being influenced by “Black Power” and “Black is Beautiful”) resulted in “black” beating out both “Afro-” and “African-American.” The latter was resurrected by Jesse Jackson in the very late 1980s as a (Rust Belt) counterpoint to “Polish-American” and “Irish-American.”
“Afro” survived only in the hair style and in a few clothing designs.
I’m white, and I think I’m a little younger than Walloon, and I can assert that I never even heard the word ‘black’ meaning African-American until the late 1960s at least. I took piano lessons beginning when I was about six, and one of the tunes which most children learned in those days was “Old Black Joe”. In all honesty it never occurred to me that Joe was black or African American. I thought he must be an old guy who wore black clothes. The only words I knew for the ethnic description were ‘negro’ or, more informally, ‘colored’.
Anecdotal “evidence” is notoriously unreliable. I could have sworn that Tom has used dictionaries to back up his ideas in the past (no doubt he will provide an example). One is treading on thin ice when one discards data that does not support one’s own philosophical predispositions, as well as one’e own memory, which can be unreliable too. Past events are often coloured by what has happened - both in the world and to the individual - in the interim: that’s why contemporaneous records are so important to the researcher.
We welcome your research data from contemporaneous records, shorn of one’s own philosophical predispositions. We also welcome your own memories as someone who lived in America in the 1960s.
Give it up. You were wrong.
At what point will the overwhelming anectodal evidence become something you will pay attention to? I learned to use Negro (as the “polite” word) in elementary school, in Virginia, in the mid-1960s.
Roger, I agree with Tom that “Black” wasn’t used largely until the late 1960’s in the US.
But, in a bit of search, I found this lovely piece by Duke Ellington , who I revere as a master, both musically and as an astute observer of culture; quite unsung these days.
This was from a speech by Duke Ellington in 1941. So, Duke was using the term Black way back then. Do read the entire excerpt: It is a fine moving speech.
More research on the topic is due.
Interesting excerpt, Elelle. I’ll try and get around to reading the article at the weekend, when I have a bit more time. Yes, it’s certainly true that this area could use more research. There is SO much guilt here, so much ambivalence, so much desire to come up with findings and conclusions which will please, salve and heal, rather than which will reflect the trutn, that - dare I say it? - it might best be performed by ignorant furriners!
How would you know?
I don’t have any guilt. You just don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have to do research, I remember it. Lots of us remember it. You’re wrong.
elelle,
Note that in the Duke Ellington piece that you link to, “black” is always an adjective and not a noun. “Negro” is always a noun in that piece. Note that the article uses one expression that is now so old-fashioned that most people wouldn’t even know what it means - “Race press.” Similarly, there was a category called “race music,” which later was known as “rhythm and blues.” “Race” as an adjective meant any institution connected with black American culture. In any case, it’s my impression that “black” was used as an adjective form of “Negro” before it began to be used as the noun form.
roger thornhill writes:
> There is SO much guilt here, so much ambivalence, so much desire to come up
> with findings and conclusions which will please, salve and heal, rather than
> which will reflect the trutn, that - dare I say it? - it might best be performed by
> ignorant furriners!
Excuse me, but what are you talking about here?
Hmm, Roger, I hear you, but I also hear the reverberations , back in the day when I held out a shingle as one who knew blues music; an enthusiastic Englishman cornered me and said, point blank: “If it were not for the British enthusiasm for the Blues in the 60’s, the music would have died out!” OK, that swell of appreciation among paying white folk gave it a shot in the arm, but really, the tradition of playing music was alive and fine on it’s own, thanks, and becoming other musical humdinger forms.
In the same manner, you wonder why people use a term in their organization that seems past proper due. Why not let people decide on their own when they want to change it?
If you could perform the research, then that would be great. But you have no means to do that, do you? So you’ll just sit there, ignorant, and a furriner.
I, on the other hand, have the means to do the research. And I’m doing it right now. I have access to two historical newspaper databases. One of these, ProQuest, has just added The Chicago Defender, one of the larger “Negro” historic newspapers in the US. I can also search the the five largest newspapers in the US for stories from the 1950’s and 1960’s that might throw light on the matter at hand.
I’ve also posted this query to the American Dialect Society Mailing List, and the professionals will be on it, although I don’t expect to receive many answers that I can post here before tomorrow night.
While there’s a wealth of ignorant furriners in the world, it seems they don’t always attempt to remedy their ignorance before coming to conclusions. You’d make an interesting modern-day de Tocqueville (or I guess just a British Bernard Henri-Lévy) if only you hadn’t reached your conclusions before examining the evidence . . .
In fact, I have already pointed out support for my position from the OED and I have, indeed, provided “contemporaneous records.” (Further “contemporaneous records” may be found among the Quotes sections on the International Movie Database for movies such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), in such public speeches as Dr. King’s final speech in the Spring of 1968, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, or his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail which cannot be dismissed as using “archaic” expressions, or the citations from the OED mentioned earlier.
(For that matter, it would be interesting if anyone could find a copy of the actual Random House Unabridged Dictionary (which is substantially more rare than either the Merriam-Webster Unabridged or the American Heritage Unabridged) to see whether the notation of “1950s” actually appears in that work or whether it was a typo that occurred while transcribing the entry into the web site. If Random House does say “1950s,” it would be an unfortunate error, but if it says “1960s” it is the victim of a later transcription error.)
So far, the earliest use of “black” as a noun that I have been able to find has been in a couple of speeches by Malcolm X from 1964, in which he uses both “black” and “Negro” intermittently. The idea that “in the late 1950s BLACK began to replace NEGRO” over five years prior to its earliest cited use is an odd assertion. Each use of “black” by Dr. King has been as an adjective and even in Malcolm X’s works “black” is more often an adjective than a noun.
What are you on about? This discussion is not concerned with reparations for slavery or rectifying Jim Crow. It is a discussion of vocabulary. It matters not to me whether the descendants of slaves are called blacks or African-Americans or colored or watu* or even niggers if that is how they choose to be identified. I have already pointed out the institutional reasons for various organizations keeping older or “outdated” names. The only question is whether your hasty and anachronistic claim that one word had been supplanted in the wrong decade, based on a single unattested reference that you leapt to use without bothering to seek corroborating testimony, has any validity. The only guilt that I can see is your attempt to deflect attention from your hasty error. There is no ambivalence, at all. We have a single web site that quotes (or misquotes) a single reference work in a Usage paragraph that has neither support of citations nor any stated provenance. There is also nothing to salve or heal but your wounded pride for having made an assertion that happens to be in error.
The truth has been provided (with citations) along with explanatory history.
Your claims for “SO much guilt here” are not supported by the actual posts in this thread. I would really hate to think that you were simply posting for the purpose of riling up other posters as that would be a pretty clear violation of the rules, which I am sure that you would never do.
- Apparently the word for “people” in Swahili.
Yep. “Watu” is the kiSwahili cognate of the much more widely-found (within that language family) form “bantu”, which means “people” and is the source of the term “Bantu” for the ethnic group (or ethnic groups) that includes speakers of kiSwahili.