How Black Americans Really Got Their Last Names

Ask where Black American last names came from and you will often hear one tidy sentence: they came from jobs. Smith, Cooper, Carter, Miller, Baker. It is true that those are old English occupational names. It does not explain how a particular family came to carry one, and for most Black families the real answer is longer, harder and far more human than a trade list.

Under slavery, there was no legal surname. Enslaved people were recorded as property, usually by a first name and an owner. Historian Douglas Egerton has noted that enslavers withheld surnames as a mark of dignity. The 1850 and 1860 censuses counted the enslaved by age and sex under the owner's name, not by name. The 1870 census was the first to list formerly enslaved people by name, which is why so many family searches hit a wall there.

But people were not nameless to each other. Genealogists and historians have documented that many enslaved people claimed surnames in private, though the law did not recognize them. Herbert Gutman's landmark study of the Black family describes naming practices that carried kinship across generations, with children named for fathers, uncles and grandparents, so that family ties survived sales that scattered relatives across plantations. A name could come from a parent, from a former owner, or from a family line that outlasted the sale that cut it.

Freedom meant choosing, and people chose differently. Historian Leon Litwack describes freedpeople taking names from a former master, a national leader, an occupational skill, a place of residence, or a color. A trade was one reason among several, and it was the person's own choice, not something a clerk handed out. Many kept the name of their last enslaver for practical reasons, to stay legible to kin, or, in at least one documented case, to assert paternity and refuse to let the man deny responsibility. Others took a parent's name or the name of an earlier owner from childhood. Others reached for freedom itself, with Freeman and Freedman, or for leaders. Booker T. Washington picked "Washington" himself when a teacher asked him for his last name at school. In the 2000 Census, about 90 percent of Americans named Washington were Black, and Jefferson was about 75 percent. Lincoln, by contrast, was about 14 percent.

The records show how different it could be inside one family. Genealogist Meaghan Siekman traced Wesley Thompson, born around 1835 in Morgan County, Alabama, who carried the name of the man who bought him as a boy, while his death record gives his parents' surname as Gyle. His family members, sold to different owners, took different surnames, yet the records show them staying close, and brothers served together in the Union Army. Other research documents children of the same parents splitting between the mother's and father's surnames after emancipation.

So a surname is a paper trail, not a bloodline. It can point a researcher toward a plantation, and it can mislead, because a family may carry the name of the last man who owned them and not the name of the family they came from. No single rule explains every family, which is the point. Not every story survives in the record, but the ones that do show people reclaiming the one thing the system had tried to keep from them.

Notice the pattern: for generations the record kept the owner's name and left the family out. When freedom came, one of the first things many people did with it was write the family back in.

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Sources: NBC News, "Many African American last names hold weight of Black history"; Facing History & Ourselves, "Names and Freedom" (citing Leon Litwack and Douglas Egerton); Meaghan E.H. Siekman, "Slave Surnames," American Ancestors Vita Brevis (May 2021); Scuffalong Genealogy, "What's in a Name?" (Apr 2014); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976), as summarized in course materials; theGrio, "Washington: the 'blackest name' in America" (Feb 2011), citing 2000 Census surname data; West Virginia Archives and History, on Booker T. Washington choosing his surname.