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FREEDOMWAYS
FOURTH QUARTER 1966

African Baptist Church (Savannah, Georgia). The Afro-American poet of the Revolutionary War, Phillis Wheatley, wrote of her people as Africans. Nevertheless, the name Negro took hold in the American language, simultaneously with the expansion of the slave trade and the slavery plantation economy.

The black community in America has dignified the name Negro through two centuries of struggle against racism in the American Republic, notwithstanding the colonialist origins of the term. Nevertheless, any serious examination of our experience in America would be inadequate if it did not take recognition of the fact that the very name we have accepted for ourselves represents something imposed upon a colonized people. In our contemporary struggle for full equality and decolonization, some of our colleagues perhaps place undue emphasis on changing the name Negro, implying that such a change would be some kind of panacea of our situation. Of course, life is not quite so simple. Yet in the total complex of our struggle, it is quite likely that at some point the black community will adopt a more fitting designation for itself such as the term "Afro-American." This perspective is consistent with the fact that the very language and terminology of a people undergo changes as the movement for emancipation accumulates new experiences, understands its history better and sets itself new objectives consistent with its aspirations to be free.

Our experience in America, especially since the end of Reconstruction, has been in all essentials an experience of colonialism. Furthermore, the status of the black population in the United States is one of the major examples of colonialism in the 20th century. That fact defines not only our position in America but also our relationship to other peoples in the world who, like ourselves, are still struggling to free themselves from a colonial past.

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 This is the first of a two-part article. The second installment will appear in the Winter issue, Vol. 7, No. 1. Mr. O'Dell is Associate Managing Editor of FREEDOMWAYS. 

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