Negro

Negro (plural Negroes) is a term traditionally used to denote persons considered to be of Negroid heritage. It has various equivalents in other languages.

Around 1442, the Portuguese first arrived in Southern Africa while trying to find a sea route to India. The term negro, literally meaning 'black', was used by the Spanish and Portuguese as a simple description to refer to the Bantu peoples that they encountered. Negro denotes "black" in Spanish and Portuguese, derived from the Latin word , meaning black, which itself is probably from a Proto-Indo-European root *nek^w-, "to be dark", akin to *nok^w-, night. "Negro" was also used of the peoples of West Africa in old maps labelled Negroland, an area stretching along the Niger River.

From the 18th century to the late 1960s, negro (later capitalized) was considered to be the proper English-language term for people of black African origin. According to Oxford Dictionaries, use of the word "now seems out of date or even offensive in both British and US English".

A specifically female form of the word, negress (sometimes capitalized), was occasionally used. However, like Jewess, it has all but completely fallen from use.

Negroid has traditionally been used within physical anthropology to denote one of the three purported races of humankind, alongside Caucasoid and Mongoloid. The suffix means "similar to". "Negroid" as a noun was used to designate a wider or more generalized category than Negro; as an adjective, it qualified a noun as in, for example, "negroid features".

Negro superseded colored as the most polite word for African Americans at a time when black was considered more offensive. In Colonial America during the 1600s the term Negro was, according to one historian, also used to describe Native Americans The American Negro Academy was founded in 1897, to support liberal arts education. Marcus Garvey used the word in the names of black nationalist and pan-Africanist organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded 1914), the Negro World (1918), the Negro Factories Corporation (1919), and the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World (1920). W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Carter G. Woodson used it in the titles of their non-fiction books, The Negro (1915) and The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) respectively. "Negro" was accepted as normal, both as exonym and endonym, until the late 1960s, after the later African-American Civil Rights Movement. One well-known example is the identification by Martin Luther King, Jr. of his own race as "Negro" in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963.

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