Working Paper: NBER ID: w18802
Authors: Lisa D. Cook; Trevon D. Logan; John M. Parman
Abstract: We document the existence of a distinctive national naming pattern for African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We use census records to identify a set of high-frequency names among African Americans that were unlikely to be held by whites. We confirm the distinctiveness of the names using over five million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois and North Carolina from the early twentieth century. The names we identify in the census records are similarly distinctive in these three independent data sources. Surprisingly, approximately the same percentage of African Americans had "black names" historically as they do today. No name that we identify as a historical black name, however, is a contemporary black name. The literature has assumed that black names are a product of the Civil Rights Movement, yet our results suggest that they are a long-standing cultural norm among African Americans. This is the first evidence that distinctively racialized names existed long before the Civil Rights Era, establishing a new fact in the historical literature.
Keywords: African American names; historical naming patterns; cultural identity
JEL Codes: J1; N3
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| High-frequency names in census records (R23) | Confirmation in independent death certificate data (J17) |
| Distinctively African American names (N97) | Longstanding cultural norm among African Americans (Z13) |
| Correlation between name disproportionality in census and death records (J79) | Evidence for national naming pattern (F52) |