A closet Negro comes out.

Back when Woodrow Wilson was President and I was in second grade, my elders told me that if any of the white kids at school called me a "nigger," I was to say, "I'm colored and proud of it." Now, some four-score years and fourteen Presidents later, that answer and several other later designations for my people are no longer deemed proper. This year, I am supposed to say I am an African American. Next year, who knows?

As a teenager in the 1920s, I decided to be a "Negro," responding to what was called the New Negro Movement among a notable group of writers, artists, and musicians, mostly based in Harlem, who felt that the term "colored" was much too colorless and did not express racial pride. Marcus Garvey's black nationalist organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which shared little else with the black intelligentsia, also preferred "Negro." Indeed, to Garvey, all blacks in the Americas and Africa were one people, and all 400 million of them, he insisted, were Negroes.

In 1940, when I registered for the prewar draft, my racial designation was crucial, since the armed forces were segregated. After putting a check after "Negro" on my draft card's list of five "races" (White first, of course, then Negro, Oriental, Indian, and Filipino), the registrar glanced at me to see what he should check for "Complexion." Reading down, the spectrum was "Sallow, Light, Ruddy, Dark, Freckled, Light brown, Dark brown, Black." He checked me as "Light brown."

In the Army, one's tint did not matter. Along with a man's name and serial number, he had to be designated as either "White" ("W") or "Colored" ("COL"). On all Army documents during my three years, three months, three weeks, and three days of service, I was back to my childhood status of being "colored."

Returning to civilian life and moving to New York, I was dismayed to find I had not left "COL" in the Army. The New York application for a driver's license had a space for "Color," but I left that blank. "No good," said the Motor Vehicles clerk, stabbing a finger at the omission. I wanted to ask him what range of colors I could choose from, but one dares not kid around with a Motor Vehicles clerk. As with the Army, it had to be one of two colors, and so I was a "COL" driver for my next ten years.

Except when behind the wheel, I could go back to being Negro again and celebrate Negro History Week, listen to Paul Robeson's Negro spirituals, lift my voice in the Negro anthem, and become a founding member of A. Philip Randolph's Negro American Labor Council. But in the next decade, almost overnight, "Negro" became a bad word and "Black" was in. To me, it made no sense to switch from the Spanish word for that color to an Indo-European synonym, but I had to keep quiet and become a closet Negro.

Malcolm X denounced all "so-called Negroes" as being Uncle Toms--he had evidently never heard of Marcus Garvey--and the young militants who advocated Black Power helped achieve the rhetorical revolution. Just as my generation had dumped "colored" for "Negro," this later generation followed the same pattern, replacing "Negro" with "Black."

That change did not last long. Next came "African-American," which was soon denounced by black nationalists as linking blacks too closely with "Euro-Americans." The consensus designation at the moment is "African [no hyphen] American." Furthermore, a movement is under way in some college-level Black Studies programs to remove the word "American" entirely and have us all termed "Africans."

It seems that whenever a new generation of Afro-Americans comes along and realizes that previous generations have not got rid of the perma-press racism in our social fabric, there is a rejection of their elders and their elders' ideas, and a resolve to be different. A change in name is easy, and the white folks couldn't care less. But each superficial new identity is short-lived. As Professor Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently observed in The New York Times, "We will know we have achieved equality and mutual respect when names for minorities stay put."

Racism, like the bite of a rabid animal, can infect a victim with the deadly disease of its madness. Whatever the black minority is called, we are far and away more American than most people in the United States. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted, "Before the Pilgrims landed, we were here."

Every year during Black History Month, Americans are reminded of the noble dream of Martin Luther King Jr. More of us need to ponder the question posed by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred?"