How should N be defined?  It is derived from the Latin word for the color black.  It is a term used to impose contempt upon some as an inferior race.  It has seeped into every form of American culture, from literature to popular debates, from cartoons to song.  Throughout history it has cropped up in children's rhymes.

Randall Kennedy - Author

It has been a familiar form of the vocabulary for whites high and low.  It has been used in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Huey Long, "The Kingfish" used the term with no awareness that it might be offensive.  Judges in Georgia and Mississippi seemed likewise ignorant of the posibility that the word might be offensive.  U. S. Supreme Court Justices used the term.

For many blacks the word has constituted a menacing prescence and has influenced significant course changes in the directions of their lives.  No one has more seriously dramatized N-as-insult than Richard Wright.  Malcolm X remembered that during his childhood after the murder of his father whites serving as his guardians openly used the term.  When Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, the manager openly questioned whether or not blacks were human.

Carl Rowan was denied the right to buy a paper in the white waiting room at a train depot.  I didn't even know Rowan was black.  I love his journalistic writings.

Carl Rowan - Journalist

Michael Jordan was suspended from the school bus for hitting a white girl that called him N.  Tiger Woods was tied up in kindergarten by older students who called him N.  Branford Marsalis says he was called N from the time he was born.  Hank Aaron, my number one sports hero of all time, in 1973, on the brink of breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record, received hate mail calling him a N.