coloured folk: to clarify

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Sat Jul 16 13:49:17 UTC 2011


At 7/15/2011 06:34 PM, George Thompson wrote:
>The whole story of Schoonmaker vs. Hodgeboom is interesting, but what I had
>in mind for you-uns was that as early as 1825 well-meaning "philanthropists"
>were trying to improve the status of a group by changing the word which
>identified it.

If I remember correctly what I once researched, this was about the
time that blacks also started "trying to improve the status of a
group by changing the word which identified it."

I don't remember where I might have encountered this -- perhaps in
the essays by Patrick Rael or Frederick Cooper in  African-American
Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum
North (2008).

Joel

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