In 1920, 99 Percent Of All Americans Named Booker Were Black : Code Switch : NPR: The distinct nature of many black names has long been the subject of national curiosity. Twenty years ago, a "Saturday Night Live" skit titled "Camp Ujaama" parodied modern black naming conventions. More recently, the comedy show "Key & Peele" took on this phenomenon in a sketch that went viral where they devised fictitious black college football players with increasingly outrageous names like L'Carpetron, D'Squarius and Shakiraquan.
After watching these segments again, I wondered what the stereotypical black names were a hundred years ago. What were the long-ago equivalents of contemporary black names?
I found the answer detailed in a recent paper titled "Distinctively Black Names in the American Past" written by professors Lisa D. Cook, Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
