Free at last! is our Continuing Imprecation - Part 1

This week’s posts (it will take two posts) will take us on a few diversions, but that’s because there are some interesting side trips in etymology. One word leads to another, which leads to another. Follow along.

I used a phrase this past week and immediately wondered if I’d used the correct one. Is it self-deprecating or self-denigrating? What’s the difference?

Denigration (we’ll take them in alphabetical order) is the noun form of the word denigrate, which means to blacken, or to disparage the character or reputation of someone. The word denigrate came to English in the 1520s from the Latin word denigrare. Denigrare is formed by adding the prefix de- (meaning complete) to the stem nigr-, which means black. And, yes, the word negro comes from the same stem word, but not until at least three decades after denigrate arrived. It came from either Spanish or Portugese, where the word for black is negro.

This being the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday in the U.S., let’s take a diversion into that etymology and usage. The word Negro has been increasingly disused and pejorative as a descriptive word for an African-American, a process that began in the 1960s. Etymonline.com cites the N.Y. Times Stylebook in its formalization and capitalized use in the early 20th century.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his most famous speech – that at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 – used the word Negro by my count 15 times and the word black five times. As I read the speech again, trying to count the two uses, I was inspired again; it has to rank among the greatest speeches ever uttered. Allow me to share the last paragraph:

…when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

When I was a child during the 1960s (living in a neighborhood that changed from primarily white residents to primarily African-American residents in a matter of a couple years) I observed the changing also of the race identifying word from Negro to black (as in Black Panthers) to African-American. (The once-used adjective “colored”, for those too young to remember, came into disuse because “all people are colored”; it is just the depth of color that differs.) Because of their association with those times of deprecation, words like negro and colored now also have a negative connotation.

Those who lived through the 1960s will never forget the process, with sit-ins and marches and riots (and for me they were all at my high school)  by which racial equality became a national goal. Hopefully the generation will come soon that will have no inkling of the great gulf of hatred and denigration that once existed between races. Then we will truly be free at last.