nigger knocking
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: nigger-knocking
Etymology: In sense 2, perhaps influenced by knick-knock, another name for the same prank.
Senses: examples: text: I knew some cats was blowing one-nighters in little sawmill stops down in Missisippi, and one time these white boys — who had been dancing all night to the colored cats' sounds — chased 'em out on the highway and whipped 'em with chains and cut their poor asses with knives! They called it 'nigger knocking.' No reason — except they was so goddamn miserable they had to mess everybody else up, ya dig?
ref: 1967 November, Larry L. King, “Everybody's Louie”, in Harper's Magazine, volume 235, number 1410, page 67:
text: Sometimes it is good to reflect on the Neanderthal period of my youth, when I rode in the back seat of a '57 Chevrolet along a night-blackened Carolina road hunting for blacks to hit with rotten watermelons tossed from the window of the speeding car, as they walked the shoulder of thin backroads. We called this intrepid form of entertainment "nigger-knocking," and it was great fun during the carnival of blind hatred I participated joyfully in during my first couple of years in high school.
ref: 1972, Pat Conroy, The Water Is Wide, Houghton Mifflin, →ISBN, page 6:
text: Having been nigger-knocking, I would have proven myself and would become a "good old boy," my most coveted appellation. ... And since everything in town was blue-lawed, and the quarters were near, and nigger-knocking had about it the air of cause as well as excitement, I suppose it was the logical choice of outlets.
ref: 1980 Fall, Robert Houston, “Nigger Knocking”, in Southern Exposure, volume 8, number 3, pages 94–95:
text: Aside from the physical harm that it caused, the social significance of nigger-knocking was its power to perpetuate the myth of the white man's dominance over us and, of course, to keep us believing in our perceived inferiority.
ref: 1999 Summer, Bill Maxwell, “Parallel Lives: Angry Young Man”, in FORUM: The Magazine of Florida Humanities, volume 22, number 2, Florida Humanities Council, page 13:
text: White boys in my school frequently talked about "going nigger knocking". That meant driving through a black neighborhood at night and if they saw a black man walking down the street hitting him with a rock or a stick.
ref: 2017, Laughlin McDonald, “Growing Up in Winnsboro, South Carolina”, in Kent Spriggs, editor, Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers; Reflections from the Deep South, 1964–1980, University Press of Florida, →ISBN:
text: I had never heard the term "nigger-knocking" until I started school at St. Ignatius. Stories floated like ghosts through the corridors of that school, bragging tales of white men packed together in nondescript cars, driving through the streets of Goat Hill looking for blacks walking along the sidewalk. The car would then speed by, and someone in the car would throw a soda bottle, or reach out with a broomstick and hit the black person in the back. One time, they found a young woman unconscious on a sidewalk after some good ol' boys went nigger-knocking on Goat Hill.
ref: 2019, Allen Eskens, Nothing More Dangerous, Little, Brown, →ISBN:
coordinate_terms: queer bashing
glosses: A racial assault by a group of white people, typically bored youths in a truck or car, on one or more black people, typically a random pedestrian.
examples: text: 33. Ding Dong Ditch — Prank involving ringing a doorbell and running from the house (also Ding Dong Door Ditch, Nigger Knocking)
ref: 1979 December, Gary Alan Fine, “The Children's Glossary; Pre-Adolescent Male Slang II”, in Children's Folklore Review, volume 2, number 2, page 3:
text: In Sanford Heights the preadolescent prank of ringing a doorbell and running away before the door was answered was known as “Nigger Knocking” as well as by its more common name, “Ding Dong Ditch.”
ref: 1987, Gary Alan Fine, With the boys : Little League baseball and preadolescent culture, page 230:
text: One native informant, a white female in her twenties, remembers that as a child she played a game called "Nigger Knocking," which involved several children knocking on someone's front door and running away to hide before the occupant could answer the door.
ref: 1998 July, Lauren E. Brown, Richard Stivers, “The Legend of "Nigger" Lake: Place as Scapegoat”, in Journal of Black Studies, volume 28, number 6, →DOI, →JSTOR, pages 704-723:
text: [O]ther voices came back to me. The voices of my sister and me as children: Eeny, meeny miney moe, catch a nigger by the toe.
Let's go nigger-knocking. My voice.
Ha! Your bicycle's nig-rigged. My sister's voice.
These words peppered my childhood vocabulary before I ever comprehended their weight or meaning. "Nigger knocking" just meant knocking on doors and running away. "Nig-rigged" just meant a shoddy repair job.
ref: 1998 Summer, Kimberly Grob, “THIS BREED OF HATE”, in The Virginia Quarterly Review, volume 74, number 3, →JSTOR, page 423:
text: Now we can go nigger knocking. ... It's time to go ring some bells, knock on some windows. Doorbell Ditch as the white boys would say.
ref: 2017 February 10, Rion Amilcar Scott, “The Nigger Knockers”, in New York Tyrant:
text: Typically the game was very simple. The rules were that someone from the group would knock on the chosen door really hard, then everyone takes off running in any direction. ... We always called this game “nigger-knockin’,” a term we later learned was only used in our neighborhoods.
ref: 2020 October 30, Tatjana Lightbourn, “Rules to the Game in the Neighborhood”, in West End Blog, Louis Armstrong House Museum:
glosses: Ding-dong ditch.
Related terms: nigger knocker