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281 1. See footnote 65 in chapter 11 to place this appendix in a context. 2. Manual of Style: Being a Compilation of the Typographical Rules in Force at the University of Chicago Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906), 1–20. The title was of- ficially changed to The Chicago Manual of Style with the thirteenth edition in 1982. A facsimile of the first edition can be read online at “The Chicago Manual of Style Online,” www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/about15_facsimile.html. Appendix D SHOULD THE N IN NEGRO BE CAPITALIZED? There was no consensus in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century in regard to the question of whether the initial letter in the word Negro should be capitalized.1 The first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, published in 1906, offered forty-nine rules for capitalizing words but said nothing about capitalizing the word Negro, or the name of any other race, for that matter.2 Nevertheless, this stylistic issue was not a trivial matter that could be easily ignored because deciding whether to capitalize Negro communicated a particular point of view regarding persons of African descent. Although both Walter F. Willcox and Alfred Holt Stone had consistently spelled negro with a lowercase n in their writings prior to March 1908, they decided to capitalize Negro in their forthcoming book, Studies in the American Race Problem. Why did they change their minds? An exchange of correspondence in 1907 between Willcox and H. B. Frissell, principal of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, offers a glimpse of Willcox’s, and possibly Stone’s, thinking in regard to the issue and may provide insight as to the rationale behind their decision to depart from their previous practice in regard to the word Negro. Willcox wrote H. B. Frissell on April 11 and raised the question of whether the first letter in Negro should be capitalized. 282 APPENDIX D 3. All three letters can be found in the “F” folder, box 15, WFWP. Although salutations and signature blocks have been omitted, the typescripts of the three letters with one attachment have not been edited or abridged. 4. Robert Russa Moton graduated from the Hampton Institute in 1890 and served as “Commandant in charge of military discipline” for twenty-five years. In 1915, Moton left Hampton to assume the presidency of the Tuskegee Institute following the death of Booker T. Washington . He served as president of Tuskegee until 1935, when he retired because of ill health (“Dr. Robert Russa Moton,” www.tuskegee.edu/Global/story.asp?S=1079853). The question has recently been raised whether it is better to print the word “negro” with a capital “N.” So far as I have observed the usage of good writers in the matter, I find that the majority of writers belonging to that race, but not all of them, use the capital, and the majority of writers belonging to the white race, but not all of them, use the small letter. The usage in England, so far as I have observed[,] is uniformly in favor of the small letter, and the assumption from the derivation and analogy seems to point to that conclusion. But I understand that a strong preference is felt by many leading colored men for the capital[,] and I have no serious objection to using it if that be the case. Will you be kind enough to tell me what your judgment is, and so far as you can, the reasons for it?3 Frissell responded to Willcox’s letter on April 16, 1907: I referred the matter of the capitalization of the word “Negro” to my Commandant of Cadets, Major R. R. Moton. This is what he says: “Negro should be written with a capital letter. It is the designation of a race—the only race not spelled with a capital letter. The reasoning employed by the people who do not use the capital is, that it is a descriptive adjective and other races take their name from the countries in which they live. But so is ‘Missouri’ a descriptive adjective, meaning muddy. The name ‘Smith’ first meant the trade of the man to whom it belonged. Numerous other cases might be mentioned.” I am also enclosing for [sic] Major Moton another paragraph on the subject. The attachment consisted of a single sheet without a title or attribution, although it apparently had been written by Major Moton.4 Since the objection to the writing of the...

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