Why the stigmatization of the term ‘Negro’?

OPINION:

As a Black American, I always approach February’s annual celebration of Black History Month with pride and bewilderment.

The reasons for the pride are obvious. The accomplishments of Americans of African descent in the face of staggering adversity should be a source of pride for Americans of all backgrounds. The inspirational oratory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the amazing autodidactic erudition of Frederick Douglass, the raw courage of journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and the dedication and piloting skills of the Tuskegee Airmen are chapters in the nation’s history of which all Americans should be proud.

But if there is considerable reason for pride, there is also cause for puzzlement. Why have we been made afraid to call our heroes what they called themselves: Negroes? You see it everywhere. Those who would be the self-appointed guardians of our language (and our thoughts) insist on the excision of the term from our vocabularies.

Titles penned in another era are changed to avoid the term. Hollywood director Frank Capra’s World War II plea for racial tolerance and inclusion, “The Negro Soldier,” gets transformed by public television stations running the film or newspaper editors listing television programming into the “African American Soldier.”

There are many, too many other examples. When President Biden referred to Negro League baseball great Satchel Paige as “the great Negro ballplayer,” some news outlets went into hysterics. This effort to be politically correct even interferes with basic language learning. There are reports that a Spanish teacher in a New York high school was reprimanded for using the Spanish word negro (black) in class.

University DEI offices send out memos cautioning instructors that the use of the term Negro might trigger students in university history classes. I have had fights with editors for my last two books because I insist on calling the African Americans of the 19th and first six decades of the 20th centuries what they proudly called themselves: Negroes.

Why this reticence, this stigmatization of the term ‘Negro’? One might be especially puzzled because it has come in recent times when it seems that every half-wit with a boom box is spewing out the “N-word,” often accompanied by lucrative video and record contracts or social media subscriptions. The stigmatization started in the late ’60s and early ’70s as Black baby boomers of my generation insisted, rightly, on bringing the term Black into a respectability it had not had in previous generations. If White people could be proud of being White, why shouldn’t we be proud of and emphasize that we were Black? Reasonable enough.

But as often happens, the correction went too far. What started as an effort to destigmatize blackness turned into an Orwellian effort to erase our Negro past. Black meant militancy and a willingness to fight White supremacy. Negro meant subservience and passivity in the face of racism. More and more, this would become the conventional wisdom, particularly in succeeding generations.

It is a conventional wisdom fed by a stunning ignorance of actual history.

The people who fought and vanquished American apartheid — Jim Crow — called themselves Negroes. Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley and their colleagues, White and Black, challenged the system of school segregation mandated by law in Southern and many border states.

They started their argument in Brown v. Board of Education by asking the Supreme Court why Negroes were singled out for separate and stigmatizing treatment in the nation’s public schools. In an era when scientific racism was at its apex, when segregationist Woodrow Wilson was president and when the American historical profession was largely dominated by pro-slavery apologists principally informed by the virulent scientific racism of the early 20th century, Carter Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. His efforts and those of his associates and successors published in the Journal of Negro History would, over time, change the way the nation and the world viewed people of African descent.

People who called themselves Negroes fought and won a titanic struggle against racial oppression. Along the way, some of the men who were part of that struggle took a side trip to hell to help liberate Nazi death camps called Buchenwald, Dachau and Mauthausen.

They came home and, in the 1950s and ’60s, spearheaded the fight against American apartheid — Jim Crow.

The name they called themselves needs no airbrushing from the nation’s history. It is time to go beyond celebrating Black history to start learning it.

• Robert J. Cottrol is the Harold Paul Green research professor of law at George Washington University.