Historians, Editors, and the N-Word
Facing the ugliness of the past in print
With the very first submission for the very first number of my forthcoming magazine, I was faced with a problem: how to edit a piece that included the N-word in a quote from a historical source.
Now, American historians encounter this word very often in our sources—in newspapers, in letters, in journals, in written accounts of the publicly-shouted racist slogans from white backlash to Black activism for civil rights. If you write about any period in the history of the United States, or the Civil War, or racism, or civil rights, or slavery, or sectionalism, or pretty much any topic that calls for focus on either the struggle for Black freedom and equality or the backlash against it, you will find multiple sources that contain this word.
In work written for our fellow scholars, professional historians generally quote our sources verbatim. Still, we are often dealing with a great surfeit of sources, and our problem is routinely a matter of choosing which newspaper article or which journal entry to cite in order to illustrate a particular point that is demonstrable from a variety of sources. Thus, I find that it is usually possible to convey the ferocity of racism and white supremacy in the 19th century without having to resort to quoting verbatim a text that features…
