"A real negro" M&D572-73

[public domain]

Europeans in Colonial America used racial labels based
on what was for them the critical category of
enslavement. Thus, depending on status, Africans were
referred to as "free" or "slave" (Franklin, 1969).
Where enslavement status was unknown, or where there
was occasion to use a collective term for all
Africans, they uses "nigger" (not a racial epithet
until the late nineteenth century) or "negro"
(Portuguese and Spanish adjective "black"; used by
fifteenth-century Portuguese slave traders; lovercased
until 1920s). Although the small number of "free"
Africans tended to refer to themselves as "colored,"
the most frequently used label, for "free" and "slave"
alike, was African (Drake, 1966).  

Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin That Talk: Language,
Culture, and Education in African  America. Chapter 2,
"Ebonics, Language Theory, and Researchin" New York, 
Routledge, 2000, page 44 

http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/history/usa/franklin/

During the first two hundred years of their existence
as a racial and ethnic group in … the United States of
America, there was a tendency for Negroes to refer to
themselves as "Africans." In the early nineteenth
century, however, free Negroes . . .  sensed a danger
in continued use of the term, since white friends and
foes alike were supporting "colonization societies"
and exerting pressure upon freedmen to leave the
country for settlement in Africa. . . . Leaders among
the freedmen felt that they might be told to "go back
to Africa" if they continued to call themselves
"African."

St. Claire Drake, "Negro Americans and the African
Interest," in The American Negro Reference Book, John
P. Davis, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1966),
662-705. Also see Minutes of the Proceedings of the
National Negro Convention, 1830-1864, Howard Bell, ed.
(New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1969) Convention Minutes,
1835, 14-15.

http://www.psu.edu/dept/cored/resources/term/term.html

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