In many cultures, a name is the first gift a family gives. For Black families in America, that naming carries extra weight. It connects the living to the dead, the present to a past that was violently interrupted. And for generations, the formal practice of passing names down, through the Jr. and Sr. tradition, belonged almost exclusively to men.
Some Black women are changing that, quietly and deliberately, by finding their own ways to carry names forward.
A grandfather’s rule that stuck
Frances “Toni” Draper, publisher and CEO of the AFRO, grew up with a name shaped by a family decree she had no say in. Her grandfather, Dr. Carl Murphy, insisted that every grandchild carry Murphy as a middle name. That rule changed her name from Toni to Frances Murphy Wood, her maiden name completing the chain.
Her father never stopped calling her Toni. Neither did she.
Looking back, Draper said she initially found the older name awkward, the kind of name that felt like it belonged to someone else’s generation. With time, that feeling reversed. She came to understand that knowing where a name comes from, and what it cost someone to carry it, gives a person something that is difficult to describe and impossible to manufacture. It gives them a place to stand.
The daughter who became a junior
Stephaine Courtney carries her mother’s name in the most literal sense. Her mother, Stephaine Beans-Noble, received the name from her own father, who told her it meant crowned with righteousness. When Beans-Noble’s daughter was born, the grandfather made the decision himself. The baby would be Stephaine Jr.
That designation has no legal standing. Courts do not recognize female juniors the way they recognize male ones. But inside this family, the naming has always meant something real.
Courtney now leads the Shades of Motherhood Network, an organization her mother once served in a senior capacity. When Beans-Noble retired, she came to work for her daughter. The reversal of roles carried its own kind of meaning. Courtney described it as an honor, a completion of something that had been set in motion long before either of them had any say in it.
What naming means after forced erasure
The significance of the naming traditions becomes sharper when placed against the history behind them. The transatlantic slave trade severed millions of Africans from their names. Names were replaced, stripped away or assigned by others with no connection to the people bearing them. The ties those names carried, to families, to places, to lineages, were cut.
Reclaiming the act of naming, and passing names forward with intention, is understood in many Black families as a form of repair. Courtney described a shared name as a pathway back to something that was taken. She said a name points toward ancestors, toward a line of people who existed before the record began and whose presence deserves acknowledgment even when documentation is sparse or absent entirely.
Legacy outside the rules
None of this fits neatly into the conventions that American legal and social culture built around naming. The Jr. naming tradition was designed with men in mind, and the expectation that women would change their names upon marriage made continuity even harder to maintain across generations.
The women in these stories worked around those structures rather than waiting for them to change. They passed first names instead of last names. They created informal designations that carried real meaning within the family even when the outside world did not recognize them. They told the stories attached to names out loud, so those stories would not disappear when the people who held them did.
That, more than any legal title, is how a legacy survives.
