This is especially remarkable given the narrative literature’s focus on cultural development and persistence of culture among African Americans. Given the unique social history of African Americans, it is remarkable that the historical development of racialized first names has received little scholarly attention. These findings further challenge the view that Black names are a product of twentieth century phenomena such as the Civil Rights Movement. Taken together, these facts provide support for the claim that Black naming patterns existed in the antebellum era and that racial distinctiveness in naming patterns was an established practice well before Emancipation. Third, the racial distinctiveness of the names increases from the early 1800s to the time of the Civil War.
Second, these same Black names are racially distinctive in the antebellum period. First, the Black names identified by Cook, Logan and Parman using post-Civil War data are common names among Blacks before Emancipation. Building on recent research that documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan, and Parman, Explorations in Economic History 53:64–82, 2014), we analyze three distinct and novel antebellum data sources and uncover three stylized facts. This paper explores the existence of distinctively Black names in the antebellum era.
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