It is refreshing to see someone use the term “Negroes” - a perfectly good & once noble designation for a race. - I am almost 69 years old & that was the only designation I had ever heard until fairly recent years, when suddenly it became forbidden to use it.
I
am 69 years old. I unconsciously went along with the interminable changing of the word for dark-skinned people at least some of whose ancestors came from Africa. One day I realized I was in a quandary over whether to write "black" or "Afro American." It struck me then that if one is to refer to such a person by race then the traditional word is "Negro." I have used it ever since and have tried to purge my language generally of PC crap. I don't use "nigger" even though that is but the southern pronunciation of "N-e-g-r-o" and I
am a Southerner because my mother who was of Northern origin insisted "nice" -read "Northern"- people "don't say that," meaning that northerners who she always thought of as more refined than southerners gave the word a Northern pronunciation.
Back in the heyday of the Civil Rights hassles southerners worked hard to learn to say "knee-grow" and about when they got it down to where they could say it without tying their tongues in knots the word was officially banned by the Yankee Language Transformation Office. Then we went through African American and Black and Afro American and black again and Afro-Am and just African and as each term became identified as pejorative it had to change again. I will stick with "Negro."