The historical names that stand out are largely biblical such as Elijah, Isaac, Isaiah, Moses and Abraham, and names that seem to designate empowerment such as Prince, King and Freeman. 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. We found that the fraction of blacks holding a distinctively black name in the early 1900s is comparable to the fraction holding a distinctively black name at the end of the 20th century, around 3%. We found that there were indeed.įor example, in the 1920 census, 99% of all men with the first name of Booker were black, as were 80% of all men named Perlie or its variations. We used federal census records and death certificates from the late 1800s in Illinois, Alabama and North Carolina to see if there were names that were held almost exclusively by blacks and not whites in the past. New data, such as the digitization of census and newly available birth and death records from historical periods, allows us to analyze the history of black names in more detail. Until a few years ago, the story of black names depended almost exclusively on data from the 1960s onward. Historical evidence does not support this belief. Before this time, the argument goes, blacks and whites had similar naming patterns.
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.
A 2012 ‘Key & Peele’ sketch poked fun of historically black names.
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