The 60’s is when black’s shed the terms “negro” and “colored” in preference to “black”.
The slogan was “I’m black and I’m proud.”
That chant is why many whites resisted the change and continued to use “negro” and “colored.”
In my experience living in the south at the time anyway.
Oh yes, and “Afro-American.”
Having a number of friends & colleagues from Africa, I avoid "African American" as it is inaccurate.
We picked her up at the airport and on the drive back home, my soon-to-be-mother-in-law, blurted out the question, "You have many n*iggers around here?"
I about wrecked the car when she said it but realized this woman had been raised in the South her whole life and that is how blacks were referred to when she was growing up.
My wife told her it would be wise not to use the term again in public. And she never did after that, at least not in our presence. She fell back into using the other most common way to refer to blacks when she was growing up....negroes.
At age 89, she has not changed and still uses that term to this day. It was the culture, not her prejudice, that selected the terms for her to use.
There was no such thing as politically correct speech in the her day growing up in the Deep South.
This is also when radicals were starting to speak of "black power." By the end of the sixties, at least in my neighborhood, the only whites who said "black" instead of "Negro" were liberals.
Even some blacks preferred "Negro" to "black." One of those was George Schoyler, a writer who first won critical acclaim during the Harlem Renaissance, even though he titled his autobiogrphy Black and Conservative (New Rochelle, Ny: Arlington, 1971).
It’s funny, but “black” was offensive in the fifties.