We also maintain this list of historical terms for your reference. Most of these will not be used in a title, description, or subject, but will instead be terms that you should look out for in the historical sources themselves. Please note that these are historical terms, many of which would be considered harmful or offensive today.
This list was compiled in the summer of 2020 by Hope McCaffrey, a PhD student at Northwestern University who worked with the Chicago History Museum’s Research Center through NU’s Chicago Humanities Initiative.
The catalog now has fuzzy searching. If you ask for Africans it will bring up an entry with the word African and vice versa. If you do want to search only for an exact spelling of a word, put that word in quotations. For instance if you search for "African" you will only get results for African but not Africans. If the spelling variation might be more than one or two letters different, try multiples searches for in the keyword search.
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| African | The term “African” is helpful if searching a collection of North American sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth, centuries. Up until about 1816, African Americans referred to themselves as Africans. With the founding of the American Colonization Society, which sought to forcibly export Black people from the United States to Libera and other African countries, Black Americans abandoned the term which associated them most closely to that continent and heritage (1). |
| Free African | This term is helpful if searching a North American collection dated from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. |
| African American | Currently, the first known appearance of the term “African American” is in a 1782 sermon written by a self-named “African American.” The identifier was not a popular one, however, and did not gain prominence until civil rights activist and minister Jesse Jackson pushed for its adoption and usage in the 1980s (as alternative to “black”) (2). Isabel Wilkerson writes that embrace of the term represented to some African Americans “that they are accepting their difficult past and resolving a long ambivalence toward Africa.” This shift hoped to change association from a racial identifier to a “cultural and ethnic identity.” In other words, Wilkerson wrote, “there is a feeling that ‘African-American’ can sometimes convey a significance that ‘black’ cannot.” There was not universal acceptance, however. “Some say they do not identify with African and resent prominent blacks telling them what to be called” (3). See also: African-Americans; Afro-American; Afraamerican |
| African-descended | This term appears sporadically throughout the nineteenth century, but not as a widely used term by either the Black community or white people See also: African-descent |
| Black | Black has been used throughout the last three centuries in the United States, but its use as a community identifier emerged with rise of the Black Power Movement in the 1960’s (replaced Negro). Invoking the term Black aimed to reclaim a negative term (and also as a counter to “white”) (4). |
| Negro | Negro (with a capital “N”) was reclaimed and became popular in the early twentieth century, especially among northern African Americans and Black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois (5). Uncapitalized, the term has been used by both white people and Black people since the eighteenth (and possibly seventeenth) century. |
| Colored | This was the dominant term throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, allegedly accepted by both white people and African Americans. It fell from popular usage with the rise of the term Negro, which seemed to Black leaders as a more specific word that fostered group identity (6). |
| People of color | This term has been used since nineteenth century by both African Americans and white people, but in describing archives this should be avoided when specifically writing about Black People (unless referencing a context in which it was historically used, such as the Cuban “gente de color”) (7). |
| Mixed-Race | |
| Interracial |
1. Ben L. Martin, “From Negro to Black to African American: The Power to Names and Naming,” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 1 (1991): 102-103.
2. Jennifer Schuessler, “Use of ‘African-American’ Dates to Nation’s Early Days,” New York Times, April 20, 2015.
3. Isabel Wilkerson, “‘African-American’ Favored By Many of America’s Blacks,” New York Times, January 31, 1989.
4. Zenobia Bell, “African-American Nomenclature: The Label Identity Shift from ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ in the 1960s,” MA thesis, UCLA, 2013, 16.
5. Martin, “From Negro to Black to African American,” 103.
6. Tom W. Smith, “Changing Racial Labels: From ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ to ‘African American,’” The Public Opinion Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Winter, 1992): 497-498.
7. P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help,” community-sourced document, (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEdDgYslX-hlKezLodMIM71My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs/mobilebasic).
| Mulatto | A term that white people used in the nineteenth and throughout most of the twentieth century to refer to people who had one parent that was perceived as white and one parent that was perceived as Black or African American. Can also refer to people of African American and Native American parentage. See also: Mulato; Mulatta |
| Quadroon | A term that white people used in the nineteenth and throughout the early twentieth century to refer to people who had one grandparent that was perceived as Black or African American and the rest of their parentage was white (in cruder terms, someone who was “one-quarter” Black). See also: Griffe |
| Octoroon | A term that white people used in the nineteenth and throughout the early twentieth century to refer to people who had one great-grandparent that was perceived as Black or African American and the rest of their parentage was white (in cruder terms, someone who was “one-eight” Black). |
| Mustee | Synonymous with the term “octoroon,” used by enslavers to describe someone who is “one-eighth” of African American or Black lineage (8). |
| Complexion | See also: Light Complexion; “Complection”; “Complected” |
| Yellow | A term used by white enslavers in the nineteenth century to describe the skin color of an enslaved person who had light skin (9). |
| White passing | See also: Passing |
| Slavery | |
| Slave | |
| Slaveholder | See also: Slaveholding [state], Non-slaveholding [state] |
| Slaveowner | See also: Slave Owner or just Owner |
| Enslaved | |
| Enslaver | |
| Enslavement | |
| Involuntary servitude | |
| Planter | |
| Plantation | |
| Slave Master | |
| Fugitive | See Also: Fugitive Slave; Fugitive Slave Law/Fugitive Law/ Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 |
| Escaped Human Property | |
| Forced Labor | |
| Field Hand | |
| Oppressed/Oppression | |
| Bound | |
| Bondmen | |
| Bondpeople | |
| Bondage | |
| Chattel | See also: Human Chattel; Chattel slavery |
| Emancipation | |
| Manumission | See also: Manumission Papers |
| Certificate of Freedom | |
| Free Papers | |
| Freedom (Free) | |
| Free men/women | |
| Free colored people | |
| Free persons/people of color | |
| Free Negroes | |
| Free Blacks | |
| Free African American | |
| Freedman/Freedmen | |
| Freedwoman/Freedwomen | |
| Indentures/d | See also: Indentured servants; Negro Indenture; Colored Indentures |
| Apprentice/d/ship | |
| South/Deep South | |
| Confederacy | |
| Pro-Slavery | |
| Slave Power | |
| Antebellum | |
| West Africa | |
| African Diaspora | |
| Transatlantic Slave Trade | |
| Domestic Slave Trade (or just slave trade) | |
| Traders (slave traders/negro traders) | |
| Slave-Catcher | |
| Slave Hunter | |
| Middle Passage (and Second Middle Passage) | |
| Slave Lists | |
| African-born | |
| Free-born | |
| “Peculiar Institution” | Used by both white and Black people to reference the particular kind of racialized, chattel slavery that developed in the American South during the antebellum period. |
| Resistance | See also: Escape; Rebellion; Insurrection; Uprising; Maroon; Petit Marronage; Harboring; Ranaway |
| Slave Insurrections | |
| Missouri Compromise | |
| Compromise of 1850 | |
| Illinois Black Law/s (1853) | |
| Black Laws | |
| Black Code | |
| Slave Patrol | |
| Mason-Dixon | |
| Slave Auction (Auction Block) | |
| Slave Market | |
| Slave Pens | |
| Advertisement | See also: Runaway advertisements |
| Likely | A term used by enslavers and specifically white slave traders, sellers, and buyers to commodify enslaved people into desirable categories (10). Historian Stephanie Jones Rogers writes, “these terms and phrases came to signify ideal characteristics prospective buyers sought in enslaved people… ‘sound’ in mind and body and thereby healthy and free from injury or disease” (11). |
| Bill of Sale | See also: Act of Sale (the legal term in Louisiana) (12) |
| Coffles | |
| Abolition/ist | See also: African American abolitionists; Black abolitionist |
| Activist | |
| African American activist | |
| Anti-Slavery | |
| Underground Railroad | |
| Reparations | |
| Colonization | See also: American Colonization Society; Emigration; Immigration |
8. Carter G. Woodson and Charles H. Wesley, The Story of the Negro Retold, (The Association Publishers, 1935), 44.
9. See: Ariela J. Gross, Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South, 108 Yale L.J. (1998); and Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” The Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (June 2000): 16.
10. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 138.
11. Stephanie Jones-Rogers, “‘[S]he could…spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: White Mother and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Slavery and Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 343.
12. Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” The Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (June 2000): 16.
| Partus sequitur ventrem (partus) | A legal doctrine claiming that the status of the child follows that of the mother. White enslavers passed this law to make slave status heritable. |
| Bondwomen | |
| Mistress/Slave Mistress | In reference to either a woman who owned enslaved people OR an enslaved woman who had some kind of sexual relation or “exchange” with enslaver. Yet the term does not accurately describe either situation. A woman who owned enslaved people should be referred to as a “female/woman enslaver,” and a relation of sexual exchange between an enslaver and an enslaved woman should not be labeled as one in which a “mistress” exists (13). |
| Concubine | |
| Wench | Term used by white enslavers to refer to enslaved women of African descent starting in the mid-eighteenth century. Application of this term exclusively to enslaved Black women constructed a certain kind of race-specific womanhood built in opposition to that of what became seen as privileged, virtuous white womanhood. This racialized womanhood became the basis upon which slavery was built in Virginia and throughout the American South (14). |
| Domestic | |
| Seamstress | |
| Wet nurse | See also: Breastfeeding, “nuss,” “suckle” (15) |
13. Martha S. Jones, “Julian Bond’s Great-Grandmother a “Slave Mistress?” How the New York Times Got it Wrong,” History News Network, August 26, 2015. (https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160451).
14. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 2; 370.
15. These are terms used in interviews with formerly enslaved people to describe their forced labor as wet nurses. See: Stephanie Jones-Rogers, “‘[S]he could…spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: White Mother and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Slavery and Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 339.
(Recommendations from P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” community-sourced document, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEdDgYslX-hlKezLodMIM71My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs/mobilebasic)
Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Lauren Davenport, “The Fluidity of Racial Classification,” Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998): 221-242.
P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help,” community-sourced document, (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEdDgYslX-hlKezLodMIM71My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs/mobilebasic).
Ariela J. Gross, Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South, 108 YALE L.J. (1998). (https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ylj/vol108/iss1/2).
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” The Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (June 2000): 13-38.
Stephanie Jones-Rogers, “‘[S]he could…spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: White Mother and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Slavery and Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 337-355.
Ben L. Martin, “From Negro to Black to African American: The Power to Names and Naming,” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 1 (Spring, 1991): 83-107.
Jennifer Schuessler, “Use of ‘African-American’ Dates to Nation’s Early Days,” New York Times, April 20, 2015. (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/arts/use-of-african-american-dates-to-nations-early-days.html).
Tom W. Smith, “Changing Racial Labels: From ‘Colored’ too ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ to ‘African American,’” The Public Opinion Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Winter, 1992): 496-514.
Isabel Wilkerson, “‘African-American’ Favored By Many of America’s Blacks,” New York Times, January 31, 1989. (https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/31/us/african-american-favored-by-many-of-america-s-blacks.html).
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