The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names

Trevon Logan, Lisa Cook and John Parman ()

No 28101, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper explores the existence of distinctively Black names in the antebellum era. Building on recent research that documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan and Parman 2014), we analyze three distinct and novel antebellum data sources and uncover three stylized facts. First, the Black names identified by Cook, Logan and Parman using post-Civil War data are common names among Blacks before Emancipation. Second, these same Black names are racially distinctive in the antebellum period. Third, the racial distinctiveness of the names increases from the early 1800s to the time of the Civil War. Taken together, these facts provide support for the claim that Black naming patterns existed in the antebellum era and that racial distinctiveness in naming patterns was an established practice well before Emancipation. These findings further challenge the view that Black names are a product of twentieth century phenomena such as the Civil Rights Movement.

JEL-codes: J1 N3 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
Note: DAE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published as Lisa D. Cook & John Parman & Trevon Logan, 2022. "The antebellum roots of distinctively black names," Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 55(1), pages 1-11, January.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28101.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28101

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28101

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().