Taking a longer historical view of America’s renaming moment: The role of Black onomastic activism within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Abstract

Renaming practices are increasingly deployed as a political technology in USA campaigns to do greater justice to the rights, histories, and identities of historically marginalized groups. African American social actors and groups have been especially active in this onomastic or naming activism. To fully make sense of this renaming moment, which is often popularly misrepresented as brand new, we outline an approach that takes a longer view of the history of Black naming by drawing together ideas from the field of Black geographies, specifically Katherine McKittrick’s ideas about Black livingness, and our work in critical place naming studies. As an illustration, we conduct a study of SNCC and the way civil rights workers and mobilized communities valued names and deployed onomastic tactics—the (re)naming of people, places, and institutions as part of their creative and grass-roots activism. These onomastic tactics facilitated and accompanied SNCC’s gathering of antiracist intelligence, constructing a subaltern transportation system, and carrying out a revolutionary remaking of place and affective atmosphere in the face of oppression. We not only seek to add a needed racial genealogy of ongoing naming struggles in America, but also use SNCC’s onomastic tactics to tell a story of the Civil Rights Movement generally not well understood and to expand what counts as activism and who counts as activists beyond canonized celebrations of the Movement in popular media and education. As an important guide to current naming struggles, the SNCC experience is instructive of the fact that renaming alone cannot count as liberation. Rather, the efficacy of naming as a civil rights practice comes from the assembling and mobilizing of names with the broader capacities of people, material places, and political practices and discourses.