Keith Baird, linguist who fought the use of ‘Negro,’ dies at 94

Keith Baird, a linguist from Barbados who rose to prominence in the 1960s arguing persuasively against the use of the word Negro and in favor of the term Afro-American, died on July 13 in Atlanta. He was 94. His daughter Marcia Baird Burris said the cause was myelodysplastic syndromes, a group of bone-marrow disorders. Mr. Baird was a teacher and administrator in New York City’s public school system when he began writing and speaking about the fraught connotations of the term Negro as the dominant way to describe people of African descent.
He told a conference of teachers in Washington in 1966 that Negro “is used solely to describe the slaved and the enslavable,” and that the time had come  to shift to Afro-American as a connotation of ethnic identity, like, for example, Irish-American. The next year, as racial tensions ignited in American cities, he said in an Ebony magazine article, “The continuing depressed economic and social status of the African people in America, enforced and maintained by the dominant European-originated Americans, is symbolized and instrumentally promoted by the continuing use of the déclassé designation ‘Negro.’”
In 1970, he called for the “semantic liberation” of African-Americans, writing in the journal Social Casework that they — not the “conquerors” who had brought their ancestors to the Americas in chains — needed to dictate the terms used to describe themselves and their community. In 1968, Mr. Baird advocated citywide decentralization when he ran to unseat Albert Shanker as president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers’ union. Mr. Shanker saw little educational value in decentralization.
Keith Ethelbert Baird was born on Jan. 20, 1923, in Arch Hall, St. Thomas Parish, in Barbados, then a British colony. His father, Maximin Alleyne Baird, was not part of his son’s life, Mr. Baird’s daughter said, and his mother, the former Matrena Ivanova Herbert Payne, left for the United States about 1930 to find work. Keith was raised by a family, the Shocknesses, who informally adopted him.
Mr. Baird described his powerful attraction to Africa in a poem he wrote inspired by a visit in 1969 to Ghana. In a video made in 2012, he recited it:
How suddenly the evening falls at the end of the sun’s theophany.
Here, where splendor calls to splendor in the million modalities of color, shade and tone
To celebrate the wonder that is Africa.
’Tis fitting that even fall be sudden.
Sudden, like the curtain that in its ruffling closure marks the finale, sends the spectators home.
In Africa, the evening falls almost silently, like a benediction.

Source: NY Times