Search results
Place names that were disproportionately popular among Black Americans in history include Boston, Jamaica, York, and Africa. Also included here are common names among enslaved people, many of which were classical and had ties to the Bible or mythology, such as Keziah and Venus, Cassius and Cato.
- Black Names Aren’T New
- What Were The Black Names Back then?
- Why Is This Important?
Many scholars believe that distinctively black names emerged from the civil rights movement, perhaps attributable to the Black Power movement and the later black cultural movement of the 1990s as a way to affirm and embrace black culture. Before this time, the argument goes, blacks and whites had similar naming patterns. Historical evidence does no...
We were interested to learn that the black names of the late 1800s and early 1900s are not the same black names that we recognize today. The historical names that stand out are largely biblical such asElijah, Isaac, Isaiah, Moses and Abraham, and names that seem to designate empowerment such as Prince, King and Freeman. These names are quite differ...
Black names tell us something about the development of black culture, and the steps whites were taking to distance themselves from it. Scholars of African American cultural history, such as Lawrence W. Levine, Herbert Gutman and Ralph Ellison, have long held that the development of African American culture involves both family and social ties among...
- Trevon Logan
Long before Tyrone, Jermaine and Darnell came along, there were Isaac, Abe and Prince. A new study reveals the earliest evidence of distinctively Black first names in the United States, finding them arising in the early 1700s and then becoming increasingly common in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
Mar 16, 2021 · At baseline, then, Black names were, at a minimum, twice as common among the enslaved as they were among all Southern Whites. Overall, the results provide strong suggestive evidence that Black names were common among the enslaved and were quite racially disproportionate in the antebellum era.
Even with the rise of created names, it is also still common for African Americans to use biblical, historic, or European names. Daniel, Christopher, Michael, David, James, Joseph, and Matthew were among the most common names for African-American boys in 2013. [2] [19] [20]
Other names, such as Isaac, Abraham, and Moses, are the most common of the black names found here. This trend implies that some names - are likely to have appeared post Emancipation, and in the case of names such as Master and Freemen, the reasons would be obvious. 5.2 Racial Name Distinctiveness in the Antebellum Era.
Mar 1, 2015 · Plantation records list mostly diminutive first names (e.g. Tom, Dolly) and more rarely biblical (e.g., Abraham, Israel), well-known historical (e.g. Matilda, Pompey), classical (e.g. Scipio,...
