another "Negro" in quotes

[George Thompson]

>
> Little-known fact: back in the day, Southern - well, farther behind
> the Cotton Curtain than Saint Louis, IAC - telephone books placed a
> "c" after the names of people who had telephones and were also
> colored. That always struck me as overkill, somehow.
>

This was the practice in the 19th C directories of residents of NYC, too.
Doesn't make much sense to me -- if you know a guy's name to look him up, the chances are that you will know whether he's colored or not.  But they seem to have figured, why take chances?  There's always somebody who doesn't get the word.

This practice didn't always work out for the best:
        [A man sues the publishers of the Directory]  The gentleman's business was that of a collector -- which calling was indicated on his sign in the abbreviated form, "Coll."  The reporter for the publishers of the Directory made a note of this fact.  But in the hands of the printer, the abbreviation "Coll" became transmuted into "col'd", otherwise "African" or "freedman".  [The Times doubts whether the plaintiff was much injured; whimsical]
        N-Y Times, December 13, 1865, p. 4, col. 4

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, October 24, 2010 3:07 am
Subject: Re: another "Negro" in quotes
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 7:46 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > the word "Negro" was used in some 1960s reference to Dudley High
>
> It would have been unnecessary for the locals to bother to specify the
> make-up of the student body of a local public school in a small,
> Southern city in 1960. Everyone would have known what it was without
> having to ask. Even if they had bothered, they most likely would have
> used "colored" to refer to colored/Negro/black/African-American
> institutions. Of course, Northern newspapers and their journalists had
> been using "Negro" at least Since The War.
>
> Little-known fact: back in the day, Southern - well, farther behind
> the Cotton Curtain than Saint Louis, IAC - telephone books placed a
> "c" after the names of people who had telephones and were also
> colored. That always struck me as overkill, somehow.
>
> --
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> –Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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