Sambo (racial term)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sambo is a derogatory and offensive label for an African American person in the English language. Historically, it is a name in American English derived from a term for a person of African and Native American ancestry. After the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era and beyond, the term was used in conversation, print advertising and household items as a pejorative descriptor for Black people. The term is now considered offensive in American and British English.
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Etymology
Sambo came into the English language from Template:Lang, the Spanish word in Latin America for a person of mixed African and Native American descent. This in turn may have come from one of three African language sources. Webster's Third International Dictionary holds that it may have come from the Kongo word Template:Lang ('monkey')—the z of (Latin-American) Spanish being pronounced here like the English s. The Royal Spanish Academy gives the origin from a Latin word, possibly the adjective Template:Lang or another modern Spanish term (Template:Lang), both of which translate to 'bow-legged'.
The equivalent term in Portuguese-speaking areas, such as Brazil, is Template:Lang.
Literature
Examples of Sambo as a common name can be found as far back as the 19th century. In Vanity Fair (serialised from 1847) by William M. Thackeray, the black-skinned Indian servant of the Sedley family from Chapter One is called Sambo. Similarly, in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of Simon Legree's overseers is named Sambo. Instances of it being used as a stereotypical name for African Americans can be found as early as the Civil War.
The name Sambo became especially associated with the children's book The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman, published in 1899. It was the story of a southern Indian boy named "Sambo" who outwitted a group of hungry tigers. Bannerman also wrote Little Black Mingo, Little Black Quasha, and Little Black Quibba.
Places
Sambo's Grave
Sambo's Grave is the 1736 burial site of a young Indian cabin boy or slave, on unconsecrated ground in a field near the small village of Sunderland Point, near Heysham and Overton, Lancashire, England. Sunderland Point used to be a port, serving cotton, sugar and slave ships from the West Indies and North America.
Sambo's restaurant chain
The once-popular Sambo's restaurant chain used the Helen Bannerman images to promote and decorate their restaurants, although the restaurants were originally claimed to have been named after the chain's co-owners, Samuel Battistone and Newell Bohnett. The name choice was a contributing factor in the chain's demise in the early 1980s.
See also
