A Note on Historical Language (Is 'Negro' a Racial Slur?)
"Colored" vs. "Negro": Historically, there have been many terms used to describe people of African descent in North America. In the time period at issue, two words that were commonly used were "colored" and "Negro." "Negro" in particular was widely used by African-American people themselves to describe themselves, and it was considered a term of respect. Writers like W.E.B. Du Bois made a specific case for it, such as in a 1928 letter where he argued that "Negro" is "etymologically and phonetically . .. much better and more logical than 'African' or 'colored' or any of the various hyphenated circumlocutions." (cited in Smith, 1992: 497).
Capitalizing "Negro": There was even a historical debate about whether the word "Negro" should be capitalized. In his article on the history of ethnonyms for the African American community, Tom Smith points out that the New York Times made the editorial decision to capitalize the word "Negro" starting in 1930: "In our 'style book' 'Negro' is now added to the list of words to be capitalized. It is not merely a typographical change; it is an act of recognition of racial self-respect for those who have been for generations in the 'lower case"' (cited in Smith, 1992: 499).
From "Negro" to "Black": Starting in the 1960s, civil rights activitsts such as Stokely Carmichael made a push to shift away from "Negro" and towards "Black" as a more powerful ethnonym. Carmichael first used the phrase "Black Power!" in 1966. The movement was largely persuasive; the scholar Zenobia Bell has shown that in the African American magazines like Ebony and Jet started consistently using the term "Black" by 1969, and the term quickly became the dominant term preferred by the younger generation. Later, activists such as Jesse Jackson suggested replacing "Black" with "African American," and that too became a broadly-used term in the 1990s (and a term that is widely used today by many news organizations as a neutral, 'objective' term). However, in recent years many writers, theorists, and activists have again made the case that a term like "Black" is more meaningful to them than the more sociological sounding "African American."
Our policy on the use of the 'N-Word': Some Black writers from this time period used the N-word in their writing, sometimes quoting speech (in the Zora Neale Hurston story "Sweat," for instance it is used both with the '-r' and '-ah' endings. There is also a poem by Frank Horne that uses that word as its title. (And there was a substantial controvery in 1925-6 over a novel by a white writer, Carl Van Vechten, which used the N-word in its title. The editor of the anthology Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, Wallace Thurman, made it a point to respond to that debate in the preface to that anthology in 1926.
To minimize the chance of offense, we are generally intending to represent the N-word in abbreviated form on this site. If any readers have any questions, concerns, or suggestions on this front, I would encourage you to contact us at the email address given above.
Further Reading:
Zenobia Bell, "African-American Nomenclature: The Label Identity Shift from "Negro" to "Black" in the 1960s." UCLA MA Thesis, 2013. Accessible here.
Tom W. Smith, Changing Racial Labels: From "Colored" to "Negro" to "Black" to "African American" The Public Opinion Quarterly , Winter, 1992, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 496-514.