Entry · catalog no. 1200
blue vein society
/ /blu veɪn səˈsaɪəti/ /BLOO vayn suh-SY-uh-tee
noun · Northern and Upper South cities; Chesnutt's certain Northern city is generally read as Cleveland · 1890s
✓ Verified
1.
A social club of the Black elite, from Reconstruction into the 1920s, whose membership ran to the very light-skinned; the name comes from the test implied at the door, that a member be pale enough for the veins to read blue through the skin. Charles Chesnutt gave the term its literary life in 1898 and used it across two stories, and his narrator is careful about where the name came from: it was an epithet thrown at the group from outside, not one they used for themselves.
“Her grandmother would not talk about that side of the family at all — blue vein society, and they had made their opinion of her mother plain.”
2.
By extension, any Black social circle that sorts by complexion. Used with contempt, and generally by people it would have excluded.
“Call it a foundation if you want. It is a blue vein society with a letterhead.”
Origin & Attribution
The Black urban elite of the North and Upper South, roughly Reconstruction through the 1920s. Charles W. Chesnutt, who lived in Cleveland and knew the world he was writing about, published The Wife of His Youth in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1898; it became the title story of his 1899 collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, which also carries the second blue-vein story, A Matter of Principle. The Atlantic ran the story without identifying Chesnutt as Black, and white critics praised it before they found out.
1898
Chesnutt publishes The Wife of His Youth in The Atlantic Monthly, July, without his race disclosed
1899
Houghton Mifflin publishes The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, carrying a second blue-vein story, A Matter of Principle
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Northern and Upper South cities; Chesnutt's certain Northern city is generally read as Cleveland · 1890s
Spoken by
Black Americans discussing the color line inside their own society, then and since
$BLUEVEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical128 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1898
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth, The Atlantic Monthly LXXXII, July 1898, pp. 55–61
magazine · printed
■
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, Houghton Mifflin, 1899
book · printed
■
Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920, Indiana University Press, 1990
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceBlue Vein Society, in the SAGE Encyclopedia of African American Society
reference · printed
See also