Slave name should not be confused with Slavic name.
A slave name is the personal name given by others to an enslaved person, or a name inherited from enslaved ancestors.
In Rome, slaves were given a single name by their owner. A slave who was freed might keep his or her slave name and adopt the former owner's name as a praenomen and nomen. As an example, one historian says that "a man named Publius Larcius freed a male slave named Nicia, who was then called Publius Larcius Nicia."[1]
Historian Harold Whetstone Johnston writes of instances in which a slave's former owner chose to ignore custom and simply chose a name for the freedman.
African-American enslaved persons often chose the names of their former enslavers when they became freemen.Malcolm X wrote:
Former slaves were free to choose their own names after they became free.[2] Many chose names like 'Freeman' to denote their new status, while others picked names of famous people or people they admired, such as US Presidents like George Washington.[3] Other commonly chosen names were 'Johnson', 'Brown' and 'Williams', which had been popular before emancipation.
An individual's name change often coincides with a religious conversion (Muhammad Ali changed his name from Cassius Clay, Malcolm X from Malcolm Little, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr, and Louis Farrakhan changed his from Louis Eugene Walcott, for example)[4] [5] or involvement with the black nationalist movement, in this later case usually adopting names of African origin (e.g., Amiri Baraka and Assata Shakur).[6]
Some organizations encourage African Americans to abandon their slave names. The Nation of Islam is perhaps the best-known of them. In his 1965 book, Message to the Blackman in America, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad writes often of slave names. Some of his comments include:
The black nationalist US Organization also advocates for African-Americans to change their 'slave' names and adopt African names.[9]
Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor stated in 2017 that she had changed her legal name to Magda Davitt, saying in an interview that she wished to be "free of the patriarchal slave names."[10] On her conversion to Islam in 2018, she adopted the Muslim name Shuhada' Sadaqat.[11]