2.10 - Black Pride, Identity, and the Question of Naming
How Demographics Shaped Identity and Naming
After the United States banned international slave trading in 1808, the share of African-born people within the broader African American population began to decline, even though enslaved Africans continued to be illegally imported for years afterward. As more generations of Black Americans were born in the U.S. rather than in Africa, the question of what to call this growing population, and what these communities called themselves, started to shift.
Around this same period, white leaders founded the American Colonization Society, an organization aimed at pushing the growing free Black population out of the country entirely and "returning" them to Africa. This effort actually had the opposite of its intended effect on identity. In response to being pushed toward an African identity they hadn't chosen, many Black Americans began emphasizing their American identity instead, and pushed back against the term "African," which up until the late 1820s had actually been the most common term used for people of African descent in the United States.
The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816, and in 1822 it started the colony on the West African coast that became Liberia. Its supporters included some white opponents of slavery but also many enslavers, who saw free Black people as a threat to slavery and wanted them out of the country.
From the nineteenth century onward, African Americans described themselves using a range of different ethnonyms, terms referring to ethnic group, racial group, or nationality, including Afro-American, African American, and Black. None of these terms were fixed or permanent, they shifted over time as political and social context changed.
This debate over naming wasn't just theoretical either, it played out in real, organized public life. Starting in the 1830s, African Americans began holding political gatherings known as Colored Conventions, held across the United States and Canada. These conventions became spaces where shared heritage was affirmed and where real debates over identity and self-identification within Black communities actually took place.
The conversation over naming continued well beyond the nineteenth century too. In 1988, civil rights activist Reverend Jesse L. Jackson championed the use of the term "African American" specifically to highlight the shared cultural heritage and community of descendants of enslaved Africans born in the United States, showing that this same question of naming and identity has continued to evolve across nearly two centuries.
Required Sources
Selections of Letters Written to Newspapers from Call and Response, 1831 to 1841
This collection pulls together real letters from named and anonymous Black writers, originally published in influential outlets like Freedom's Journal, The Liberator, and The Colored American, along with minutes from the Fifth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States. Reading these letters directly gives you access to the actual voices debating identity and naming in real time, rather than a modern summary of that debate. Since some of these letters came out of the Colored Conventions movement itself, they capture the same conversations happening in those gatherings, showing how ordinary people, not just prominent leaders, were actively wrestling with questions of what to call themselves and why it mattered.
The letters show that there was no single agreed-upon name. Some writers defended "African," the name used by many of the first Black churches and mutual aid societies, as a proud link to their heritage. Others rejected it because the American Colonization Society used African identity as an excuse to push free Black people out of the country, and they preferred terms like "colored" or "colored American" to stress that they were Americans by birth with a claim to citizenship. The newspaper The Colored American, founded in New York in 1837, chose its name to insist on exactly that. Some went further: at the 1835 national convention in Philadelphia, William Whipper's resolution, quoted below, urged Black Americans to stop calling themselves "colored" as well and to remove "African" from the names of their institutions. Reading these debates shows that naming was a political choice tied to the fight over whether Black people belonged in the United States.
On motion of W. Whipper, seconded by R. Purvis, Resolved, That we recommend as far as possible, to our people to abandon the use of the word "colored," when either speaking or writing concerning themselves; and especially to remove the title of African from their institutions, the marbles of churches &c.
[...] William Whipper's resolution in relation to us, using the words "colored" and "Africans," was called up, and after an animated and interesting discussion, it was unanimously adopted.
Fifth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour, Minutes of the Fifth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States (1835), pp. 14 to 15. Source: Colored Conventions Project Digital Records (scan of the 1835 pamphlet)
Letters to newspapers on what Black Americans should call themselves (1831 to 1841)
In the 1830s, Black readers wrote letters to papers like The Liberator and The Colored American arguing over what to call themselves: African, colored, or colored American. The name mattered because the American Colonization Society was trying to send free Black people to Africa, so many writers dropped "African" to make clear that the United States was their home. The letters show that naming was a real public debate, the same question the 1835 convention answered with the resolution above. (The letters are collected in Gates and Burton, Call and Response, 2011.)