Antedating of "African-American"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 09:42:10AM -0400, Joanne M. Despres wrote:
> > A while back Jesse Sheidlower reported that the OED staff
> > checked an 1854 Accessible Archives passage that included the
> > term "African-American" and discovered that the printed text
> > actually read "Africo-American."  Would this have been the
> > quotation, Jesse?
>
> Yes, this is that quotation.

Sorry that I forgot about Jesse's earlier debunking of this antedating.  I
have tried a bunch of other databases and not succeeded in antedating the
first use in the OED.

Fred Shapiro



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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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