John Hardly,

We {African Americans} have experimented with numerous group names among them being "African", "Negro", "Colored"; "Colored People", "Afro-American", "Black", and "African American" [with or without a hypen}. Because the referent "African American" refers to a geograhical location just as most other hyphenated ethnic names {such as "Italian-American" and "Irish American"}, since at least the late 1970s that has been the preferred formal group name for Black Americans. However, "Black" {I prefer the capitol letter spelling} is also acceptable, particularly as an informal referent. Note that the politically correct usage is "Black people", and not "the Blacks".

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Here's an interesting article on group referents:

Name Games: Attempting to Define "African-American"

And here's an excerpt from that article:

Name Games
The folly in the attempts to define "African-American."
By Richard Thompson Ford
Posted Thursday, Sept. 16, 2004, at 3:21 AM PT


Among the many indignities racial minorities must endure are the perennial debates over the meaning of racial identity. Are the people formerly known as "Negroes" or "colored people" to be called people of color, black, Afro-American, or African-American? Are people of Mexican and Central-American ancestry Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, or Latin-American? Is it still OK to call people "Oriental," or is that a term best limited to rugs and geographic locations? More urgent than the nomenclature itself are the questions about who "counts" as a member of these groups, with their ever-increasing string of aliases.

A recent version of this controversy involves immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean and whether they are "African-Americans." Harvard professors have publicly worried that over half of Harvard's "black" students did not descend from American slaves but are, rather, immigrants or the children of immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean. Though it started off on the right track, this debate predictably became as much about the "identity" of these immigrants as the direction of Harvard's admissions policies.

Meanwhile Republican Alan Keyes complained that the Democratic Party's rising star, Barack Obama—the son of a Kenyan immigrant—"[wrongly] claims an African-American heritage." In reaction to which UC-Berkeley linguist John McWhorter quite reasonably pointed out that immigrants from, well, Africa, who are now residents of the United States of America, have a stronger claim to the term "African-American" than most American blacks, whose connection to Africa is generations old. Others worried that defining "African-American" as rooted in geographic origin seems to suggest that Teresa Heinz Kerry, born in Mozambique, and Charlize Theron, born in South Africa, are "African-American."

The nation anxiously awaits the answers to these urgent social questions.

It shouldn't. Arguments about the correct definition of racial identity are this century's version of medieval scholastic theologians' debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. They seem to be of vital moral and spiritual importance, involving many contested terms, conceptual puzzles, and facts not in evidence. They're a great way for smart people to pass the time until the bartender pours the next round. But there's no way to resolve these questions or even to agree on common grounds for debating them.... "

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IMO, the entire article is worth the read for those interested in this subject.