A closet Negro comes out.

• Author: Brown, Lloyd L.
• Position: Journal Entry - Column

Back when Woodrow Wilson was President and I was in second grade, my elders told me that if any of the white kids at school called me a "nigger," I was to say, "I'm colored and proud of it." Now, some four-score years and fourteen Presidents later, that answer and several other later designations for my people are no longer deemed proper. This year, I am supposed to say I am an African American. Next year, who knows?

As a teenager in the 1920s, I decided to be a "Negro," responding to what was called the New Negro Movement among a notable group of writers, artists, and musicians, mostly based in Harlem, who felt that the term "colored" was much too colorless and did not express racial pride. Marcus Garvey's black nationalist organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which shared little else with the black intelligentsia, also preferred "Negro." Indeed, to Garvey, all blacks in the Americas and Africa were one people, and all 400 million of them, he insisted, were Negroes.

In 1940, when I registered for the prewar draft, my racial designation was crucial, since the armed forces were segregated. After putting a check after "Negro" on my draft card's list of five "races" (White first, of course, then Negro, Oriental, Indian, and Filipino), the registrar glanced at me to see what he should check for "Complexion." Reading down, the spectrum was "Sallow, Light, Ruddy, Dark, Freckled, Light brown, Dark brown, Black." He checked me as "Light brown."

In the Army, one's tint did not matter. Along with a man's name and serial number, he had to be designated as either "White" ("W") or "Colored" ("COL"). On all Army documents during my three years, three months, three weeks, and three days of service, I was back to my childhood status of being "colored."

Returning to civilian life and moving to New York, I was dismayed to find I had not left "COL" in the Army. The New York application for a driver's license had a space for "Color," but I left that blank. "No good," said the Motor Vehicles clerk, stabbing a finger at the omission. I wanted to ask him what range of colors I could choose from, but one dares not kid around with a Motor Vehicles clerk. As with the Army, it had to be one of two colors, and so I was a "COL" driver for my next ten years.

Except when behind the wheel, I could go back to being Negro again and celebrate Negro History Week, listen to Paul Robeson's Negro spirituals, lift my voice in the Negro anthem, and become a...