***Not being from there or that era, is this, itself, a stereotype, or is this true?***
It’s true. My mom was raised in Tennessee and she always called black people niggers, not out of meanness or anything but that is just what blacks were called then.
My aunt did the same, drove a mail route through niggertown, and thought nothing of referring to them as niggers, because it is just what blacks were called then.
Look at the literature of the time. Major magazines had stories in them in which the word nigger was used often as a reference to colored people of Africa, India, South Seas.
H P Lovecraft’s story THE RATS IN THE WALLS has a cat named Niggerman,
The South Sea stories of John Russell uses the term quite often.
In the movie, THE DAM BUSTERS, the officer in charge has a black dog named Nigger.
I myself was not raised that way as I am originally from the Mountain States. My dad always impressed on us to never call Latinos “Mexicans” but Spanish, and I never knew there were so many nicknames for different races till I was in the military back in 1966.
It was more complicated in New Mexico than whether to call Latinos Mexicans or Spanish- Spanish was used to designate the descendants of the Spaniards and they would make it plain they were not Mexicans; Mexicans were from Mexico. That was like a mine field, I remember when I was a kid a Spaniard friend of my dad’s yelling and cursing because his daughter was marrying a Mexican as if it was a fate worse than death. It is still that way in some of the elders, but mostly not so serious as they took it back then.
H P Lovecraft’s story THE RATS IN THE WALLS has a cat named Niggerman"
I can't believe you mentioned that; I just finished reading that story. I found a hardcover compilation of twenty Lovecraft stories at Barnes and Noble for $7.95.
I was surprised the cat's name wasn't edited out somehow.