A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’?

The debate among black people in America over how they should be described has often centered on identity as a political statement.

In her 1904 essay “Do We Need Another Name?” Fannie Barrier Williams, an educator and activist, described a lively discussion unfolding at the time among African-American scholars over whether to shed the label Negro in favor of terms like colored or Afro-American. Colored, she wrote, was a “name that is suggestive of progress toward respectful recognition.”

At the heart of the discussion, she wrote, was whether African-Americans needed a new label divorced from Negro and its connections to slavery, something of a fresh start that indicated their new place in society as free people.

Some, like W.E.B. Du Bois, favored keeping the term Negro and transforming it into something positive — an affirmation of their perseverance as a people and their freedom.

“There are so many Negroes who are not Negroes, so many colored people who are not colored, and so many Afro-Americans who are not Africans that it is simply impossible even to coin a term that will precisely designate and connote all the people who are now included under any one of the terms mentioned,” Barrier Williams wrote.

Negro became the predominant identifier of people of African descent for much of the first half of the 20th century, and even then descendants of enslaved people from Africa waged a yearslong campaign before getting most of society, including The Times, to capitalize it.

With the rise of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s, the word black, once seen as an insult for many African-Americans, started winning embrace. In just a few years, it became the predominant descriptor of black people as Negro became obsolete. Mr. Jackson’s campaign brought African-American into popular use in the late 1980s, and it is now often used interchangeably with black.