From Negro to black to African American to Black (but never colored)

https://www.leadingconsciously.com/blog/why-need-labels-rose-by-any-other-name-matter-5

?I was raised as a Negro child in a Negro family in a Negro community in the segregated South. We capitalized Negro.?That fight had been won in the 1920s.

People in my community were very proud to say we were Negroes and not coloreds. Colored is what White people called us when they wanted to diminish us. I can still hear White clerks in downtown shops referring to “that colored gal.” I grew to detest that term.

The switch from colored to Negro began well before I was born. Legendary Black leaders Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois led the switch in the 1920s, although they initially had opposition.?People of the times objected to the term?Negro?because it seemingly disconnected us as a people from our African roots, yet DuBois and others maintained that it was more substantive than either?African?or?colored.

In the 1950s and 1960s, we were definitely not black. To call someone black was to insult them.

While the African Blacks on television were widely portrayed as ignorant and “uncouth,” I heard a different story at home.?My mother said that her once enslaved grandfather boasted he was a member of an African tribe. My father told me that Africans had ruled kingdoms. Reconciling the degrading images on television with my parents’ portrayal of royalty was challenging as a child.?I had to grow up and learn our history before it all made sense.

Malcolm X and other Black leaders (Mohammed Ali, Stokely Carmichael) proclaimed that we were black. James Brown sang, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!” Black and proud!? We echoed those words: Black and proud and beautiful.

To my dismay, in December 1988, the National Urban Coalition with Rev. Jesse Jackson as the spokesperson declared that we were no longer Black, we were African Americans.

By 2005, I was following the lead of most Black media in capitalizing Black. When Jean Ramsey and I submitted the manuscript for?Reframing Change?to our publisher, the edited copy came back with all references to Black and White changed to lower case.?

My knee-jerk reaction was to feel dissed.? No, you cannot define me, I thought. We responded that only the White media, not the Black media, used lower case.?

This has changed. I strongly suspect that this is part of the sea change that is now occurring as a result of millions of people watching George Floyd’s callous murder on television.??

On June 19, 2020, the AP style guide announced they would capitalize Black and Indigenous.

This is big. The White media is saying that we as Black people have the right to define ourselves.??

The decision to capitalize is another step forward.?Capital B connotes a level of respect that small b does not.?

Names matter. Labels matter.