Designations for Colored Folk

Abstract

WX THEN THE New York Times announced in an editorial on March 7, 1930, that it would capitalize the word Negro thereafter, there were loud hosannahs from the Aframerican intelligentsia, for (with an exception to be noted) they seemed to be convinced that lifting the word out of lower case would also give a leg up to its bearers. The decision of the Times was inspired, according to its own account, by Major Robert Russa Moton, then principal of Tuskegee Institute, but he was by no means the originator of the movement, nor was the Times the first American newspaper to yield. The true pioneer seems to have been Lester Aglar Watson, a colored journalist hailing from St. Louis, who, after a varied career on both Negro and white newspapers, was made minister to Liberia in 1935. 'In 1913,' he says of himself in Who's Who in America, 'with cooperation of Associated Press, started movement for capitalization of N in Negro.' He does not give the name of the first newspaper to be fetched, but by the time the Times succumbed there were already some important ones in his corral-among them, the New York World, Herald Tribune and Telegram, the Chicago Herald-Examiner (Hearst), the Christian Science Monitor of Boston, the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, and the Brooklyn Eagle. Moreover, he had made some converts in the South, even in the Deep South-for example, the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser (then edited by the late Grover Hall), the Durham (N.C.) Sun, and the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger. Yet more, he had persuaded a number of national magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the New Republic, the American Mercury, and Time. Finally, he had rounded up several government agencies-for example, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Education and the whole Department of Commerce. But the surrender of the Times was hailed as a crucial victory in the long war, and when it was followed three years later by that of the Style Manual of the Government Printing Office, which sets the style for the Congressional Record and is generally followed by other government publications, there was a renewal of the rejoicing.