Fwd: "AAVE" (the abbrev. itself)

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 09:48:24AM -0700, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> an appeal to people who ought to know; i'll post anything further i get
> on this...
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> >From: "John R. Rickford" <rickford at stanford.edu>
> >Date: October 6, 2004 9:33:07 AM PDT
> >To: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
> >Cc: Geneva Smitherman <smither4 at pilot.msu.edu>
> >Subject: Re: Fwd: "AAVE" (the abbrev. itself)
> >
> >I'm sure there are earlier attestations than 1993, but probably not
> >much earlier, since the term African American itself was only formally
> >introduced by Jesse Jackson in 1988.  (It had begun to be used, as a
> >replacement for Afro-American and Black, before then.)

Obviously John and Geneva know vastly more about this than I do,
but I had been under the impression that there had been earlier
formal efforts to introduce _African-American_ than Jackson's.
OED mentions an April 1972 conference at which Ramona Edelin,
president of the National Urban Coalition, proposed it, and OED
includes several examples of organization names. There's a note
in the Journal of Negro History from 1973 that reports that the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History had
voted 2 to 1 in a mail ballot to rename itself the African-American
Historical Association. They subsequently decided to go with
The Association for the Study of African-American Life and
History, which still keeps "African-American".

This is all not to say that 1988 wasn't a turning point in
the popular acceptance of "African-American", but it does seem
to be the case that the term was in at least reasonably wide
use in the intellectual community for some years before then.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED