The term African-American may seem to be a product of recent decades, exploding into common usage in the 1990s after a push from
advocates like Jesse Jackson, and only enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001.
The O.E.D.’s entry, revised in 2012, traces the first known occurrence to 1835, in an abolitionist newspaper. But now, a researcher has discovered a printed reference in an anti-British sermon from 1782 credited to an anonymous “African American,” pushing the origins of the term back to the earliest days of independence.
“We think of it as a neutral alternative to older terms, one that resembles Italian-American or Irish-American,” said Fred Shapiro, an associate director at the Yale Law School Library, who found the reference. “It’s a very striking usage to see back in 1782.”
Mr. Shapiro, a longtime contributor to the O.E.D. and the editor of
the Yale Book of Quotations, found the reference last month in one of his regular sweeps of various online databases that have transformed lexicographic research by gathering vast swaths of historical texts — once scattered across the collections of far-flung libraries and historical societies — in one easily searchable place.
One day, Mr. Shapiro typed “African American” into a database of historical newspapers. Up popped an advertisement that appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal on May 15, 1782, announcing: “Two Sermons, written by the African American; one on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis, to be SOLD.”
With the help of George Thompson, a retired librarian from New York University, Mr. Shapiro found one of the titles — “A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis” — and located a copy of it, a 16-page pamphlet, at Houghton Library at Harvard University.
The sermon, which crows about the surrender of the British Army at Yorktown the previous year, was acquired by Harvard in 1845 and seems to have been all but uncited in scholarly literature. Its author — listed on the title page as “an African American” — is anonymous, identified only as “not having the benefit of a liberal education.”
“Was it a freeman?” Mr. Shapiro said. “A slave? We don’t know.”
Black people in the Colonial period, whatever their legal status, were most commonly referred to as “Negro” or “African.”
But in the years after the Revolution, various terms emphasizing their claim to being “American” — a label which was applied to people of European descent living in the colonies by the end of the 17th century — came into circulation.
“Afro-American” has been documented as early as 1831, with “black American” (1818) and “Africo-American” (1788) going back even further.
“We want dancing and
raree-shows and ramadans to forget miseries and wretchedness as much as the Africo-americans want the Banjar” — banjo — “to digest with their Kuskus the hardships of their lives,” a correspondent wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1788. (“Kuskus” is a variant of “couscous.”)
Katherine C. Martin, the editor of United States dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said the O.E.D.’s researchers were in the process of confirming Mr. Shapiro’s discovery.
“It’s very exciting,” she said. “Once we have it nailed down, I would expect we’ll update our entry.”
The sermon, one of the earliest surviving ones by a black American, may also attract interest from historians.
In it, the speaker boasts about the capture of Cornwallis and decries the British assault on “the freedom of the free born sons of America” while nodding toward the fact of “my own complexion.”
“My beloved countrymen, if I may be permitted thus to call you, who am a descendant of the sable race,” one passage begins.
The speaker also addresses fellow “descendants of Africa”
who feel loyalty to Britain, asking: “Tell me in plain and simple language, have ye not been disappointed? Have ye reaped what you labored for?”
The other sermon mentioned in the ad, Mr. Shapiro said, may be “A Sermon on the Present Situation of Affairs of America and Great-Britain,” which had been previously known to scholars. Both refer to “descendants of Africa,” he said, and have dedications invoking South Carolina, whose governor had been held in solitary confinement by the British for nearly a year.
But curiously, the title page of the other sermon attributes it to “a Black.”
“In other words, the bifurcation between the terms African-American and black, the two leading terms today, was present from the very beginning,” Mr. Shapiro said.
