Jesse Jackson wants to ban "N-word"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 12/1/06, Margaret Lee <mlee303 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> FWIW, this is an excerpt from a paper I wrote on the subject a few years ago:
>
> The shift from Black to African American occurred in 1988 when Dr. Ramona
> Edelin, President of the National Urban Coalition, proposed that the next year's
> meeting be called, not the Black Summit, but the African American Summit.
> The purpose of this change was to reassess the condition of blacks in America
> while "linking Africans in North America with those on the Continent of Africa and
> throughout the Diaspora "(Smitherman, in Mufwene et al., 1998, 213).

Edelin was also involved in the Dec. 19, 1988 press conference of
black leaders where "African-American" first got serious media
exposure, but Jesse Jackson got most of the attention:

-----
New York Times, Dec. 21, 1988, p. A16
Jackson and Others Say 'Blacks' Is Passe
CHICAGO, Dec. 20 (AP) -- A group of prominent blacks, including the
Rev. Jesse Jackson, says members of their race prefer to be called
African-Americans.
''Just as we were called colored, but were not that, and then Negro,
but not that, to be called black is just as baseless,'' Mr. Jackson
said at a news conference Monday after the group met to discuss
national goals.
''To be called African-Americans has cultural integrity,'' he said.
''It puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group in
this country has a reference to some land base, some historical
cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural
maturity.''
Mr. Jackson was joined by Richard Hatcher, the former Mayor of Gary,
Ind., Ramona Edelin, the National Urban Coalition's president, Gloria
Toote, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development,
and others.
-----

And back in the mid-'60s when "Afro-American" was popularized, there
were already some suggesting "African-American" as an alternative:

-----
New York Times, Dec. 11, 1966, p. 45
Substitute Word for "Negro" Argued
"There's no letter 'o' in Africa; we should just be called
African-Americans, just as others are called Italian-Americans or
Japanese-Americans," said Mr. Michaux [sc. Lewis H. Michaux, owner of
the National Memorial African Bookstore in Harlem].
-----


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org