Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word Read online

  Nigger has seeped into practically every aspect of American culture, from literature to political debates, from cartoons to song. Throughout the 1800s and for much of the 1900s as well, writers of popular music generated countless lyrics that lampooned blacks, in songs such as “Philadelphia Riots; or, I Guess It Wasn't de Niggas Dis Time,” “De Nigga Gal's Dream,” “Who's Dat Nigga Dar A-Peepin?,” “Run, Nigger, Run,” “A Nigger's Reasons,” “Nigger Will Be Nigger,” “I Am Fighting for the Nigger,” “Ten Little Niggers,” “Niggas Git on de Boat,” “Nigger in a Pit,” “Nigger War Bride Blues,” “Nigger, Nigger, Never Die,” “Li'l Black Nigger,” and “He's Just a Nigger.” The chorus of this last begins, “He's just a nigger, when you've said dat you've said it all.”6

  Throughout American history, nigger has cropped up in children's rhymes, perhaps the best known of which is

  Eeny-meeny-miney-mo!

  Catch a nigger by the toe!

  If he hollers, let him go!

  Eeny-meeny-miney-mo!

  But there are scores of others as well, including

  Nigger, nigger, never die,

  Black face and shiny eye.7

  And then there is:

  Teacher, teacher, don't whip me!

  Whip that nigger behind that tree!

  He stole honey and I stole money.

  Teacher, teacher, wasn't that funny?8

  Today, on the Internet, whole sites are devoted to nigger jokes. At KKKomedy Central–Micetrap's Nigger Joke Center, for instance, the “Nigger Ghetto Gazette” contains numerous jokes such as the following:

  Q. What do you call a nigger boy riding a bike?

  A. Thief!

  Q. Why do niggers wear high-heeled shoes?

  A. So their knuckles won't scrape the ground!

  Q. What did God say when he made the first nigger?

  A. “Oh, shit!”

  Q. What do niggers and sperm have in common?

  A. Only one in two million works!

  Q. Why do decent white folk shop at nigger yard sales?

  A. To get all their stuff back, of course!

  Q. What's the difference between a pothole and a nigger?

  A. You'd swerve to avoid a pothole, wouldn't you?

  Q. How do you make a nigger nervous? A. Take him to an auction.

  Q. How do you get a nigger to commit suicide?

  A. Toss a bucket of KFC into traffic.

  Q. How do you keep niggers out of your backyard?

  A. Hang one in the front yard.

  Q. How do you stop five niggers from raping a white woman?

  A. Throw them a basketball.9

  Nigger has been a familiar part of the vocabularies of whites high and low. It has often been the calling card of so-called white trash—poor, disreputable, uneducated Euro-Americans. Partly to distance themselves from this ilk, some whites of higher standing have aggressively forsworn the use of nigger. Such was the case, for example, with senators Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell, both white supremacists who never used the N-word. For many whites in positions of authority, however, referring to blacks as niggers was once a safe indulgence. Reacting to news that Booker T. Washington had dined at the White House, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina predicted, “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”10 During his (ultimately successful) reelection campaign of 1912, the governor of South Carolina, Coleman Livingston Blease, declared with reference to his opponent, Ira Jones, the chief justice of the state supreme court, “You people who want social equality [with the Negro] vote for Jones. You men who have nigger children vote for Jones. You who have a nigger wife in your backyard vote for Jones.”11

  During an early debate in the United States House of Representatives over a proposed federal antilynching bill, black people sitting in the galleries cheered when a representative from Wisconsin rebuked a colleague from Mississippi for blaming lynching on Negro criminality. In response, according to James Weldon Johnson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), white southern politicians shouted from the floor of the House, “Sit down, niggers.”12 In 1938, when the majority leader of the United States Senate, Alben Barkley, placed antilynching legislation on the agenda, Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina (who would later become a supreme court justice and secretary of state) faulted the black NAACP official Walter White. Barkley, Byrnes declared, “can't do anything without talking to that nigger first.”13

  Nigger was also a standard element in Senator Huey P. Long's vocabulary, though many blacks appreciated the Louisiana Democrat's notable reluctance to indulge in race baiting. Interviewing “The Kingfish” in 1935, Roy Wilkins (working as a journalist in the days before he became a leader of the NAACP) noted that Long used the terms “nigra,” “colored,” and “nigger” with no apparent awareness that that last word would or should be viewed as offensive.14 By contrast, for Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, nigger was not simply a designation he had been taught; it was also a tool of demagoguery that he self-consciously deployed. Asked by a white constituent about “Negroes attending our schools,” Talmadge happily replied, “Before God, friend, the niggers will never go to a school which is white while I am governor.”15

  As in Georgia, so in Mississippi, where white judges routinely asked Negro defendants, “Whose nigger are you?”16 Reporting a homicide, the Hattiesburg Progress noted: “Only another dead nigger—that's all.”17 Three decades later, the master of ceremonies at a White Citizens Council banquet would conclude the festivities by remarking, “Throughout the pages of history there is only one third-rate race which has been treated like a second-class race and complained about it—and that race is the American nigger.”18

  Nor was nigger confined to the language of local figures of limited influence. Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds referred to Howard University as the “nigger university.”19 President Harry S Truman called Congressman Adam Clayton Powell “that damned nigger preacher.”20 Nigger was also in the vocabulary of Senator, Vice President, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. “I talk everything over with [my wife],” he proclaimed on one occasion early in his political career. Continuing, he quipped, “Of course … I have a nigger maid, and I talk my problems over with her, too.”21

  A complete list of prominent whites who have referred at some point or other to blacks demeaningly as niggers would be lengthy indeed. It would include such otherwise disparate figures as Richard Nixon and Flannery O'Connor.22

  Given whites’ use of nigger, it should come as no surprise that for many blacks the N-word has constituted a major and menacing presence that has sometimes shifted the course of their lives. Former slaves featured it in their memoirs about bondage. Recalling her lecherous master's refusal to permit her to marry a free man of color, Harriet Jacobs related the following colloquy:

  “So you want to be married do you?” he said, “and to a free nigger.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I'll soon convince you whether I am your master, or the nigger fellow you honor so highly. If you must have a husband, you may take up with one of my slaves.”23

  Nigger figures noticeably, too, in Frederick Douglass's autobiography. Re-creating the scene in which his master objected to his being taught to read and write, the great abolitionist imagined that the man might have said, “If you give a nigger an inch he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master.… Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.”24

  In the years since the Civil War, no one has more searingly dramatized nigger-as-insult than Richard Wright. Anyone who wants to learn in a brief compass what lies behind African American anger and anguish when nigger is deployed as a slur by whites should read Wright's The Ethics of Living Jim Crow. In this memoir about his life in the South during the teens and twenties of the twentieth century, Wright attacked the Jim Crow regime by show
ing its ugly manifestations in day-to-day racial interactions. Wright's first job took him to a small optical company in Jackson, Mississippi, where things went smoothly in the beginning. Then Wright made the mistake of asking the seventeen-year-old white youth with whom he worked to tell him more about the business. The youth viewed this sign of curiosity and ambition as an unpardonable affront. Wright narrated the confrontation that followed:

  “What yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, git smart?” he asked.

  “Naw; I ain’ tryin't’ git smart,” I said.

  “Well, don't, if yuh know what's good for yuh!… Nigger, you think you're white, don't you?”

  “No sir!”

  “This is white man's work around here, and you better watch yourself.”25

  From then on, the white youth so terrorized Wright that he ended up quitting.

  At his next job, as a menial worker in a clothing store, Wright saw his boss and his son drag and kick a Negro woman into the store:

  Later the woman stumbled out, bleeding, crying, and holding her stomach.… When I went to the rear of the store, the boss and his son were washing their hands in the sink. They were chuckling. The floor was bloody and strewn with wisps of hair and clothing. No doubt I must have appeared pretty shocked, for the boss slapped me reassuringly on the back.

  “Boy, that's what we do to niggers when they don't want to pay their bills,” he said, laughing.26

  Along with intimidation, sex figured in Wright's tales of Negro life under segregationist tyranny. Describing his job as a “hall-boy” in a hotel frequented by prostitutes, the writer remembered

  a huge, snowy-skinned blonde [who] took a room on my floor. I was sent to wait upon her. She was in bed with a thickset man; both were nude and uncovered. She said she wanted some liquor and slid out of bed and waddled across the floor to get her money from a dresser drawer. I watched her.

  “Nigger, what in hell you looking at?” the white man asked me, raising himself up on his elbows.

  “Nothing,” I answered, looking miles deep into the black wall of the room.

  “Keep your eyes where they belong if you want to be healthy!” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  On a different evening at this same hotel, Wright was leaving to walk one of the Negro maids home. As they passed by him, the white night watchman wordlessly slapped the maid on her buttock. Astonished, Wright instinctively turned around. His doing so, however, triggered yet another confrontation:

  Suddenly [the night watchman] pulled his gun and asked: “Nigger, don't you like it?”

  I hesitated.

  “I asked yuh don't yuh like it?” he asked again, stepping forward.

  “Yes, sir,” I mumbled.

  “Talk like it then!”

  “Oh, yes, sir!” I said with as much heartiness as I could muster.

  Outside, I walked ahead of the girl, ashamed to face her. She caught up with me and said: “Don't be a fool! Yuh couldn't help it!”

  This watchman boasted of having killed two Negroes in self-defense.27

  Among the ubiquitous stories featuring nigger that appear in literature by and about black Americans, several others also stand out.

  In the summer of 1918, Lieutenant George S. Schuyler, proudly dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, stopped to get his boots shined at the Philadelphia railroad station. The bootblack, a recent immigrant from Greece, refused in a loud voice to serve “a nigger.” This affront helped push Schuyler into going absent without leave, an infraction for which he was briefly imprisoned.28 Although Schuyler became a writer and mined his own life for much of his material, this encounter with nigger-as-insult was so upsetting that he never publicly mentioned it.

  In 1932 a young black Communist named Angelo Herndon found himself on trial for his life in Atlanta, Georgia, for allegedly organizing an insurrection. Testifying against him was a hostile witness who referred to him as a nigger. Herndon's black attorney, Benjamin Jefferson Davis, requested that the white judge intervene, prompting an ambiguous ruling:

  Davis: I object, Your Honor. The term “nigger” is objectionable, prejudicial, and insulting.

  Judge Wyatt: I don't know whether it is or not.… However, I'll instruct the witness to call [Herndon] “darky,” which is a term of endearment.29

  Radicalized by this experience, Davis himself soon thereafter joined the Communist party.

  The civil rights activist Daisy Bates recalled an episode from her childhood in which a butcher refused to take her order until he had served all of the white customers in the shop, regardless of whether she had preceded them. “Niggers have to wait,” the butcher stated.30

  When a clerk at a drugstore soda fountain called him “nigger,” nine-year-old Ely Green asked his foster mother what it meant. “Why should I be called a nigger?” he inquired. “It must be very bad to be a nigger.” Bothered by her refusal or inability to explain, the boy spent a sleepless night trying to decipher the meaning of this mysterious word. “What could a nigger be,” he wondered, and “why should God make me a nigger?”31

  Paul Robeson earned a degree from Columbia Law School but turned his back on a career as an attorney after, among other incidents, a stenographer refused to work for him, declaring, “I never take dictation from a nigger.”32

  Malcolm X remembered that during his childhood, after his family fell apart following the murder of his father, the whites who served as his guardians openly referred to blacks as niggers. And then there was his encounter with a white teacher who, in recommending a career in carpentry rather than the law, urged young Malcolm to be “realistic about being a nigger.”33

  When Jackie Robinson reported to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top minor-league team, the manager earnestly asked the team's owner whether he really thought that niggers were human beings.34 Robinson, of course, would have to contend with nigger throughout his fabled career. During a game played on April 22, 1947, he recalled hearing hatred pour forth from the dugout of the Philadelphia Phillies “as if it had been synchronized by some master conductor”:

  “Hey, nigger, why don't you go back to the cotton field where you belong?”

  “They're waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!” “We don't want you here, nigger.”35

  On a tour of the South in 1951, the journalist Carl Rowan tried to buy a newspaper in the white waiting room of a train depot since there were no papers in the colored waiting room. As he was about to pay, a white station agent hurriedly intervened to stop the transaction. Rowan complained that under the separate-but-equal theory of segregation he should be able to purchase any item in the colored waiting room that was available in the white waiting room. But the station agent was insistent:

  “Well, you'll have to go back and let the redcap come and get the paper,” he explained.

  “The redcap? He's darker than I am and I've got the nickel—what's the logic there?” I argued.

  “He's in uniform.”

  “Suppose I were in uniform—[the uniform] of the United States Navy?”

  “You'd still have to go where niggers belong.”36

  In the early 1960s, at the height of his celebrity as a comedian, Dick Gregory ventured south to join other activists in protesting blacks’ exclusion from the voting booth. In his autobiography, he recounted an altercation he had with a policeman in Greenwood, Mississippi, who, without just provocation, shoved him and ordered,

  “Move on, nigger.”

  “Thanks a million.”

  “Thanks for what?”

  “Up north police don't escort me across the street against the red light.”

  “I said, move on, nigger.”

  “I don't know my way, I'm new in this town.”

  The cop yanked on my arm and turned his head. “Send someone over to show this nigger where to go,” he hollered.…

  I pulled one of my arms free and pointed at the crowd.

  “Ask that white woman over there to come here and show me where to go.”

>   The cop's face got red, and there was spittle at the corner of his mouth. All he could say was: “Nigger, dirty nigger.…”

  I looked at him. “Your momma's a nigger. Probably got more Negro blood in her than I could ever hope to have in me.”

  He dropped my other arm then, and backed away, and his hand was on his gun. I thought he was going to explode. But nothing happened. I was sopping wet and too excited to be scared.37

  Either Gregory was lucky or his celebrity gave him more protection than others enjoyed. When Charles McLaurin, an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was jailed in Columbia, Mississippi, a patrolman asked him, “Are you a Negro or a nigger?” When McLaurin responded, “Negro,” another patrolman hit him in the face. When he gave the same reply to the same question, McLaurin was again beaten. Finally, asked the question a third time, he answered, “I am a nigger.” At that point the first patrolman told him to leave town and warned, “If I ever catch you here again I'll kill you.”38

  As a child, the playwright August Wilson stopped going to school for a while after a series of notes were left in his desk by white classmates. The notes read: “Go home nigger.”39

  The Olympic sprinter Tommie Smith remembers an incident from his boyhood in which a white child snatched an ice cream cone out of his hand and snarled, “Niggers don't eat ice cream.”40

  Michael Jordan was suspended from school for hitting a white girl who called him “nigger” during a fight over a seat on a school bus in Wilmington, North Carolina.41

  Tiger Woods was tied up in kindergarten by older schoolmates who called him “nigger.”42

  Recalling the difficulties she faced in raising her black son in a household with her white female lover, the poet Audre Lorde noted that “for years in the name-calling at school, boys shouted at [her son] not—‘your mother's a lesbian’—but rather—‘your mother's a nigger.’ ”43