Chuck Berry won’t sing for ‘Johnny’ in US election
”In the ’50s there were certain places we couldn’t ride on the bus,” Berry said. “And now there is a possibility of a black man being in White House. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last,” he said, quoting the words of a Negro spiritual song famously invoked by assassinated civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr.
I can only hope that the reporter and editors on this story are Brazilian and therefore unfamiliar with how archaic and offensive the term “Negro” is considered here in the U.S. Seriously.
Kate
We did not use the term “Negro,” we used the term “Negro spiritual,” which is still in wide use. You can go to negrospiritual.com, you may order numerous recordings of Negro spirituals from amazon.com, and so on. And, in a forum which attracts vocal and varied opinions about our news content daily, I believe yours was the only e-mail we received about this subject: GBU Editor
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The term Negro is very active in use in the USA: as in the United Negro College Fund (www.uncf.org/), and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. NAACP is also very much alive in the USA: it stands for The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It’s how you call a person, the attitude of your speech, that makes a word offensive, or simple descriptive.
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