By Don Valentine
It’s Black History month and a good time to reflect on our story
[also known as “is-story”]. The word Nigger, proper spelling for emphasis, hereinafter “Ni****”, has been around us for centuries. “Ni****” is derived from the Latin word for the color Black, niger. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it did not originate as a slur but took on a derogatory connotation over time.
The wealthy Virginia plantation owner John Rolfe is noted as one of the first to use a derivative of this word. He recorded in his journal the first shipment of Africans to Virginia in 1619 and listed them as “Negars.” A 1689 inventory of an estate in Brooklyn, New York, made mention of an enslaved “Niggor” boy. The seminal lexicographer Noah Webster referred to Negroes as “Negers.”
The word Negro migrated into American lexicon along with the use of “Ni****” early in the early 1800s. NPR reporter Kee Malesky chronicled this jargon merging into mainstream vocabulary. A little research into early sources turns up “An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves into any Port or Place Within the Jurisdiction of the United States” (signed in 1807), which applied to “any Negro, Mulatto, or person of Color” — indicating that the term was well-enough established to be used in the text of legislation.
During the civil rights movement of the late 60s and 70s, the two words became heinous words. 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. 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 U.S. Supreme Court, had largely stopped using the word Negro.
The African American moniker is commonly credited to Reverend Jackson in the early 80s. Meticulous research by Yale law librarian Fred R. Shapiro establishes the first documentation of this name. The Oxford English Dictionary traced its documented occurrences of “African American” back as far as 1835. (The related term “Afro-American,” which enjoyed a brief popularity in the 1960s, has an 1831 citation in the OED.) I did a routine search for the phrase in America’s Historical Newspapers, the Readex company’s very powerful database of early US papers, and was surprised to be led to a 1782 sermon published in Philadelphia. The sermon, whose only known surviving copy is at Harvard’s Houghton Library, was titled “A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis.” The title page of the pamphlet includes the byline “By an African American.”
