11 January 2021
Today, we know honky as an Americanism, a contemptuous, Black slang term for a white person. This sense of the term was in its heyday in the 1970s, and while you still encounter it, honky has become less common. But this use in Black slang is only attested from the 1940s, and the term itself dates to the turn of the twentieth century when it referred to immigrants from Eastern Europe, and often appeared in the context of manual or factory laborers. Honky is a variation on Hungarian.
The form hunk is attested on 13 January 1896 in the pages of the New York Herald:
The average Pennsylvanian contemptuously refers to these immigrants as “Hikes” and “Hunks.” The “Hikes” are Italians and Sicilians. “Hunks” is a corruption for Huns, but under this title the Pennsylvanian includes Hungarians, Lithuanians, Slavs, Poles, Magyars and Tyroleans. A writer who recently described a trip to Mars told of the race of Ambau—dwarfed and apelike creatures that performed menial services for the Martian people. The Pennsylvanian regards the Hikes and Hunks as far below Ambau.
The form bohunk is attested in 1903, and hunky in 1910.
The honky / honkies spelling appears in the pages of the Railroad Telegrapher in January 1904 in a discussion of unionization of the railroads and the Order of Railroad Telegraphers (O.R.T.):
The men at “CA,” Orrville, say they are getting enough wages now; don’t care to earn any more. They put me in mind of some “honkies” that were working for this road. A contractor came to them and offered them more money. They spokesman stepped forward and said: “We wanti no more job, we maki ‘nough mon.” The three men at “CA” would rather throw levers for two roads and do telegraphing for two roads for they money they are getting now than to join the O.R.T. and do the same amount of work for more money.
The above quotation doesn’t make clear what honkies means, but writing in April 1916 Samuel Gompers, of the American Federation of Labor, uses and explains the term:
These workers have not yet become assimilated and part of our nation. Their outlook is less broad Their conceptions of their own rights and the freedom that ought to be theirs are far less complete than what they should be, but, nevertheless, these foreigners—“Dagoes, Wops, Honkies," call them what you will—are human beings with hearts and souls, and all of them have the natural desires of human beings and infinite possibilities of human development.
The slang of jazz took up the term, and it appears in this context in clarinetist and cannabis aficionado Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow’s 1946 autobiography, Really the Blues:
I’m standing under the Tree of Hope, pushing my gauge. The vipers come up, one by one.
FIRST CAT: Hey there Poppa Mezz, is you anywhere?
ME: Man I'm down with it, stickin' like a honky.
FIRST CAT: Lay a trey on me, ole man.
Mezzrow conveniently supplies a translation of his “jive”:
(I’m standing under the Tree of Hope, selling my marihuana. The customers come up, one by one.
FIRST CAT: Hello Mezz, have you got any marihuana?
ME: Plenty, old man, my pockets are full as a factory hand's on payday.
FIRST CAT: Let me have three cigarettes.)
Note that Mezzrow is still associating honky with “factory hands,” so the term at this point still has class as well as racial connotations.
Mezzrow, who was white and Jewish, was well known for his collaborations with Black musicians, and much of what he himself terms “jive” in his book is Black slang. From the slang of jazz, honky moved into general Black slang. Stokely Carmichael, chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is recorded as using the term on 10 April 1967, an early appearance of the Black slang usage appearing in a mainstream, White publication:
During the rioting, a newsman asked a group of students: “Why are you doing this?”
One replied: “Because the white people are running our university.” Carmichael, during an appearance here Thursday night, told students: “The honkies—whites—are dictating your lives.”
By the late 1960s honky had lost any class or intra-White ethnic connotations and had simply come to mean a white person.
Sources:
“Arrested for Mafia Murders.” New York Herald, 13 January 1896, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2020.
Gompers, Samuel. “Editorials.” American Federationist, 23.4, April 1916, 280–81. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. honkie, n., bohunk, n., hunky, n.
Mezzrow, Milton “Mezz” and Bernard Wolfe. Really the Blues. New York: Random House, 1946, 216, 354. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Negro Students Battle Cops at Fisk University.” Bridgeport Telegram (Connecticut), 10 April 1967, 4. NewspaperArchive.com.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. honky, n. and adj.; September 2020, bohunk, n. and adj.; second edition, 1989, s.v. hunk, n.3.
The Railroad Telegrapher, 21.1, January 1904, 85. HathiTrust Digital Archive.