Historical debates over naming indicate that Black American identity was an unstable, moving target. Naming patterns among African Americans have always been based on a variety of factors. Some reflected their lineages and cultural backgrounds in African societies. Others incorporated contemporary influences, cultural hybridity, and acquired survival skills that marked their centuries-long presence in the Americas.

During the colonial and early national period in the United States, the word African appeared in the names of Black churches, fraternal organizations, and other institutions and forums. The use of the term was a reflection of continued identification with the African homeland that many in the diaspora still valued. This continued even after two or more generations removed from the African continent. However, African declined in usage during the antebellum period. This was as the American Colonization Society and other white-led efforts to deport Black Americans to Africa gathered momentum. By mid-century, other terms floated around in the literary circles of Free Blacks that never made inroads among the Black masses. But these attempts still revealed an ongoing struggle of an oppressed people to identify themselves in the world, and in contrast to their oppressors. Terms such as Africo-American, Anglo-African, and Americo-Liberian—the latter used to describe Black American settlers in Liberia who sought to distinguish themselves from indigenous ethnic groups—were flirted with briefly. Eventually, the traditional terms Negro and colored would hold sway over many congregations, newspaper ventures, and other Black institutions and enterprises following the Civil War. Occasional breaks with routine, such as those from journalist T. Thomas Fortune, included lesser-used phases such as Afro-American, a nod to the US citizenship codified for Black people by the Fourteenth Amendment (1868).

Finding names for Black American identity was contingent upon present social conditions and current prospects for the achievement of first-class US citizenship. There would always be those such as Frederick Douglass who would insist upon the term American. This was in fear that people of African descent in the US could be viewed as desiring to be something other than (and separate from) Americans. There were also times when exclusion from US society and the denial of citizenship claims were of greatest concern. In those periods, some Black people opted for terms that did not reference geography or the site of their nativity and/or residence, but instead ones that connected them to people of African descent elsewhere. In the early twentieth century, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, led by Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, encouraged its members to conceive people of African descent as a single, globe-spanning race. This race would have a common history, condition, and destiny. As such, Garvey insisted upon the capitalization of the term Negro, elevating the word to a proper noun. One might associate such a term with the grandeur and potential of a particular people, nation, or empire. This was even as African Americans of the period routinely experienced Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, lynchings, and race riots.

Although groups such as the Nation of Islam would question their legitimacy and accuracy, the terms Negro or colored would be widely used for much of the twentieth century. It would not be until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and especially the Black Power Movement that followed, that this would change. African Americans collectively debated the meaning of the group’s name, whether as a self-identity or one imposed. To stand up and identify oneself as Black by the late 1960s and onward was an act of defiance against a history that debased blackness. It was also an affirmation that an oppressed people could seize the power of self-definition. They could declare to the world who they were or at least hoped to be. The emblems of this mindset—represented by the wearing of afro and braided hairstyle, the celebration of Kwanzaa, the emergence of Black Studies programs, and adoption of Afrocentric names—would become important markers of these new values and cultural assumptions. In many instances these practices had a regenerative impact on the psychological health and well-being of Black people in America.

For many Black Americans (who became commonly known as African Americans by the 1990s), Africa remained a kind of point of origin or homeland. But this was largely in an abstract way. The hugely popular mini-series Roots; the globalized struggle against apartheid in South Africa; diasporic “homecoming” tourism to places such as Ghana; and the advent of the internet have made Africa more tangible and knowable to Black people across the world. Yet naming conventions remain unsettled and ever-evolving. Terms such as African American exist alongside Black, (Afro-)Latino/a, mixed race, or person of color. Such cultural complexity and political tension have always characterized efforts to understand (and label) vast numbers of people across space, time, and condition, and undoubtedly this reality will continue to exist.