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• See also The Long Fight for the Capitalization of the “n” in “Negro” here  

“I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” W.E.B. BuBois

I was walking home the other day, taking a short cut through the Chamber of Commerce (of Asheville) and stopped to read an historical marker placed in parking lot for a Civil War prison and hospital.  Sprinkled throughout the two hundred word synopsis were varied parenthetic ( ) corrections of the quoted text. But not when it came to the quoted line using the small-n “negro”, there was no parenthetic correction to (N)egro.  No sic. Nothing.

The “Negro Pencil” was found in the corporate pamphlet, The Pencil, published by the American arm of the Czech company Koh-I-Noor Pencil Company.  It was a lovely thing, really, a lusty bit for the pencil fancier.  And then I came to this.

The “Negro” Pencil is not a matter of non-translation into “hard black” or whatever–there are no other instances of the transliteration not taking place.  “Negro Pencil” is a product of its time. 

The history of the power of words is long and complex, and for the most
part is on one side or the other of the political and social mirror, at
least in the United States. Controlling the meaning of a word or phrase
controls the idea which alters the way people approach it, defining the
very heart of what may control the impulse for war or peace, which
means that people may die as much for words as they will for ideas.

“Negro” may be capitalized here, but perhaps it is because it started a sentence.

It may have been capitalized, but using the name of a race to sell the color of a pencil might as well have taken the capitalization away, demeaning a race to sell a pencil, all without a second thought.  It was a product of the time that such a discrimination could be so engrained as to not even think that the use of the word was demeaning. 

Washington Redskins.