Distinctively Black Names in the American Past

Lisa Cook, Trevon Logan and John Parman ()

No 18802, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We document the existence of a distinctive national naming pattern for African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We use census records to identify a set of high-frequency names among African Americans that were unlikely to be held by whites. We confirm the distinctiveness of the names using over five million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois and North Carolina from the early twentieth century. The names we identify in the census records are similarly distinctive in these three independent data sources. Surprisingly, approximately the same percentage of African Americans had "black names" historically as they do today. No name that we identify as a historical black name, however, is a contemporary black name. The literature has assumed that black names are a product of the Civil Rights Movement, yet our results suggest that they are a long-standing cultural norm among African Americans. This is the first evidence that distinctively racialized names existed long before the Civil Rights Era, establishing a new fact in the historical literature.

JEL-codes: J1 N3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-his
Note: DAE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Cook, Lisa D. & Logan, Trevon D. & Parman, John M., 2014. "Distinctively black names in the American past," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 64-82.

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