When Was The Referent "Negro" Replaced By The Referents "Black" And "African American"?

 

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents two online responses to the question "When Was The Referent "Negro" Replaced By The Referents "Black" And "African American"?

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REPRINT OF PORTION OF WIKIPEDIA'S PAGE ON "NEGRO"  (retrieved January 22, 2022 at 10:35 AM EDT)
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro#United_States
"In the English language, negro is a term historically used to denote persons considered to be of Black African heritage. The word "negro" means "black" in both Spanish and in Portuguese, where English took it from.^[1] The term can be construed as offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral, largely depending on the region or country where it is used. It has various equivalents in other languages of Europe.

[...]

United States

Prevalence of "negro" as a demonym has varied in American English. All-Negro Comics was a 1947 comic anthology written by African-American writers and featuring black characters.

Negro superseded colored as the most polite word for African Americans at a time when black was considered more offensive.^{[7][better source needed][failed verification]} In 17th-century Colonial America, the term "Negro" had been also, according to one historian, used to describe Native Americans.^[8] John Belton O'Neall's The Negro Law Of South Carolina (1848) stipulated that "the term negro is confined to slave Africans, (the ancient Berbers) and their descendants. It does not embrace the free inhabitants of Africa, such as the Egyptians, Moors, or the negro Asiatics, such as the Lascars."^[9] The American Negro Academy was founded in 1897, to support liberal arts education. Marcus Garvey used the word in the names of black nationalist and pan-Africanist organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded 1914), the Negro World (1918), the Negro Factories Corporation (1919), and the Declaration Of The Rights Of the Negro Peoples of the World (1920). W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Carter G. Woodson used it in the titles of their non-fiction books, The Negro (1915) and The Mis-Education Of The Negro (1933) respectively. "Negro" was accepted as normal, both as exonym and endonym, until the late 1960s, after the later Civil Rights Movement. One well-known example is the identification by Martin Luther King, Jr. of his own race as "Negro" in his famous "I Have A Dream" speech of 1963.

However, during the 1950s and 1960s, some black American leaders, notably Malcolm X, objected to the word Negro because they associated it with the long history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination that treated African Americans as second class citisens, or worse.^[10] Malcolm X preferred Black to Negro, but also started using the term Afro-American after leaving the Nation of Islam.^[11]

Since the late 1960s, various other terms have been more widespread in popular usage. These include black, Black African, Afro- American (in use from the late 1960s to 1990) and African American.^[12] Like many other similar words, the word "black", of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin, has a greater impact than "Negro", of French/Latinate origin (see Linguistic purism in English). The word Negro fell out of favor by the early 1970s. However, many older African Americans initially found the term black more offensive than Negro.

The term Negro is still used in some historical contexts, such as the songs known as Negro spirituals, the Negro leagues of baseball in the early and mid-20th century, and organizations such as the United Negro College Fund.^[13][14] The academic journal published by Howard University since 1932 still bears the title Journal of Negro Education, but others have changed: e.g. the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (founded 1915) became the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1973, and is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; its publication The Journal of Negro History became The Journal of African American History in 2001. Margo Jefferson  titled her 2015 book Negroland: A Memoir to evoke growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in the African-American upper class.

African American linguist John McWhorter has bemoaned attacks on the use of "Negro" in "utterances or written reproductions of the word when referring to older texts and titles". He sites reports that performances or publishing of certain works (William L. Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony”, and an anthology of Norman Mailer's works) have been avoided, "out of wariness of the word 'Negro'” used in titles; and of "two cases" between 2020-2021 "of white college professors having complaints filed against them by students for using the word 'Negro' in class when quoting older texts."^[15]

The United States Census Bureau included Negro on the 2010 Census, alongside Black and African-American, because some older black Americans still self-identify with the term.^[16][17][18] The U.S. Census used the grouping "Black, African-American, or Negro". Negro was used in an effort to include older African Americans who more closely associate with the term.^[19] In 2013 the census removed the term from its forms and questionnaires.^[20] The term has also been censored by some newspaper archives.^[21]"

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COMPLETE REPRINT OF OCTOBER 2010 JIM CROW MUSEUM ARTICLE: WHEN DID THE WORD NEGRO BECOME SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE?

From https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2010/october.htm
"Question

Senator Harry Reid got in trouble for referring to President Obama as a "light skinned" African American with "no Negro dialect." What's the big dea with using the work Negro? Last time I checked there was a United Negro College Fund run by blacks.
--John Babcock - Williams, Arizona

Answer

Obama and Reid

Senator Harry Reid apologized for his comment, made before the 2008 election, that Barack Obama could win in part because he was a "light skinned" African-American with "no Negro dialect." Reid, who is resisting calls for his resignation, described the gaffe as a "poor choice of words." When did the word Negro become socially unacceptable?

It started its decline in 1966 and was totally uncouth by the mid-1980s. The turning point came when Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase black power at a 1966 rally in Mississippi. Until then, Negro was how most black Americans described themselves. But in Carmichael's speeches and in his landmark 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, he persuasively argued that the term implied black inferiority. Among black activists, Negro soon became shorthand for a member of the establishment. Prominent black publications like Ebony switched from Negro to black at the end of the decade, and the masses soon followed. According to a 1968 Newsweek poll, more than two-thirds of black Americans still preferred Negro, but black had become the majority preference by 1974. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times abandoned Negro in the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s, even the most hidebound institutions, like the U.S. Supreme Court, had largely stopped using Negro.

Had Sen. Reid chosen to defend his word choice, he could have cited some formidable authorities. Colored was the preferred term for black Americans until W.E.B. Du Bois, following the lead of Booker T. Washington, advocated for a switch to Negro in the 1920s. (Du Bois also used black in his writings, but it wasn't his term of choice.) Despite claims that Negro was a white-coined word intended to marginalize black people, Du Bois argued that the term was "etymologically and phonetically" preferable to colored or "various hyphenated circumlocutions." Most importantly, the new terminology -- chosen by black leaders themselves-symbolized a rising tide of black intellectual, artistic, and political assertiveness. (After achieving the shift in vocabulary, Du Bois spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to capitalize his preferred term. In 1930 -- nine years before Harry Reid was born -- the New York Times Style Book made the change.) Black supplanted Negro when the energy of this movement waned.

In 1988, after the black power movement had itself faded, many leaders decided another semantic change was required. Jesse Jackson led the push toward African-American. But, so far, the change does not seem to have the same momentum that Negro and black once did. In recent polls, most black interviewees express no preference between black and African-American, and most publications don't recommend the use of one over the other.

It can be challenging for institutions and older people, who have seen racial terms come and go during their lifetimes, to adapt. The NAACP, founded in 1909, declined to change its name during the DuBois revolution but did stop using colored in all other contexts. Negro History Week, begun in 1926, changed to Black History Month in 1976. The United Negro College Fund is now trying to emphasize its initials rather than its full name. The last time the Supreme Court used the word Negro outside quotation marks or citations to other scholarship was in 1985. The writer was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, who came of age during the time of DuBois. Despite public outcry, the U.S. Census still includes the word Negro, because many older people still use it.

October 2010 response courtesy of Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2241120/

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