Rev. Jesse Jackson, Other Black Leaders Push Term ‘African American’

On this day in 1988, a group of Black leaders including Rev. Jesse Jackson and representatives from the NAACP met to discuss the National Black Agenda.

It was here that Jackson and his peers catapulted the term “African American” into the country’s lexicon.

The term had been used since the 1970s but never gained widespread acceptance until after this Chicago convention.

He said, ″To be called African Americans has cultural integrity, it puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.″

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