Entry · catalog no. 1313
Chocolate City
/ /ˈtʃɑklɪt ˈsɪti/ /CHOK-lit SIT-ee
noun · Washington, D.C. — coined on Black AM radio there in the early 1970s, then applied to majority-Black cities generally · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
Washington, D.C., as a majority-Black city, used with pride and self-possession.
“He moved to Chocolate City in seventy-one and never once called it the nation's capital.”
2.
By extension, any majority-Black American city — Atlanta, New Orleans, Detroit, Newark.
“Every Chocolate City in the country is having the same argument about rent.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Washington, and specifically Black radio: the phrase was in use by disc jockeys on WOL-AM and WOOK-AM in the early 1970s, before Parliament recorded it. Bobby "The Mighty Burner" Bennett, at WOL from 1968, has said the jocks had been calling the city Chocolate City for three or four years before George Clinton got to it, and the historians of Black Washington record the radio origin directly. Clinton did not coin it. What Parliament's 1975 album did was carry the name national and add its counterpart, the vanilla suburbs. The backdrop is real and datable: D.C. became the first large American city with a Black majority in 1957, was more than seventy percent Black by the early 1970s, and got an elected mayor and council back under the Home Rule Act signed in December 1973. The term now sits in tension with its own city — D.C. slipped below a Black majority around 2011 — and an entry that presents it as a current description without that fact is out of date.
1957
Washington becomes the first large U.S. city with a Black majority
1973
The Home Rule Act is signed on December 24, restoring an elected mayor and council
1975
Parliament's Chocolate City is released on April 8 on Casablanca, taking the name national
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Washington, D.C. — coined on Black AM radio there in the early 1970s, then applied to majority-Black cities generally · 1970s
Spoken by
Black Washingtonians about their own city; then Black residents of any city where they were the majority
$CHOCOLThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady51 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
64/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1975
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Chris Myers Asch & George Derek Musgrove — Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital — book, Univ. of North Carolina Press · 2017
p. 381; the citable source for the pre-Parliament origin on WOL and WOOK
■
Parliament — Chocolate City — LP, Casablanca Records · 8 Apr 1975
Produced by George Clinton; the title track imagines Muhammad Ali as president and Aretha Franklin as First Lady, and coins the vanilla suburbs
■
+ Cite a sourceKesha M. Morant — "Language in Action: Funk Music as the Critical Voice of a Post–Civil Rights Movement Counterculture," Journal of Black Studies 42:1 — journal · 2011
pp. 75–90; peer-reviewed analysis of the track
See also