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New work with @drlisadcook @jmparman on "The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names" is out today @nberpubs Very excited about this project-- more interesting facts about the history of Black names! https://www.nber.org/papers/w28101
Background: A few years ago we began researching Black names and discovered that Black names had a history that no one had discussed previously. We now turn to a different set of questions about where these names come from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014498314000059
We find that the Black names we found using data from 1870-1910 were very common names among Blacks before Emancipation. We find the same percentages as they had after the Civil War, and (more interesting) they were increasing over the 19th century!
We also find that Black names are racially distinctive in the antebellum period. The data sources that give names of enslavers (for example, shipping records and sales records) help us to see that the names of the enslaved are highly disproportionate from white (enslaver) names.
Last we show that there is a time trend! Whites *used* to have these names in the early 1800s but by the 1850s they stopped using these names, which became Black. The racial distinctiveness of the names increases from the early 1800s to the time of the Civil War.
This last fact is very, very interesting because it shows that there was increasing selection driving Black names. We also note that some names which appeared after Emancipation (King, Master, Freeman) were not common before the Civil War. Much more work to be done!
