The Oxford English Dictionary contains evidence of the use of black in reference to African peoples as early as 1400; no doubt it was used orally before then, and certainly it has been in continual use ever since. Though it never descended to the level of a racial epithet, black was often looked upon with disfavor by earlier generations of African Americans. This was especially true during the period following the Civil War, when emancipated slaves and their descendants rejected black and its semantic twin negro—the terms most closely associated with two and a half centuries of servitude—in favor of colored. During the first part of the 20th century colored, in turn, lost ground to a newly capitalized Negro, which remained as the preferred racial label until the social and political upheavals of the 1960s.
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The Black Power movement that followed on the heels of the decades-long civil rights struggle called, among other things, for the adoption of black as a term of racial pride. The campaign for the acceptance of black is remarkable for the swiftness with which it accomplished its purpose as well as for its success in altering the status of a word that had often been regarded by both blacks and whites with suspicion. Today black, or Black, remains the preferred term at most if not all levels of discourse. While African American has gained wide acceptance, especially in the media, recent polls in the black community continue to show a strong preference for black.
