coon

A black person.

And that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon! Who let all this riff-raff into the room?

A raccoon.

1865, Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, Chapter IX. "The Sea and the Desert", page 187. He also said that minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels.

How about a glen bong for you and your 'coon?

a black race traitor.

A member of a colorfully dressed dance troupe in Cape Town during New Year celebrations.

A coonass; a white Acadian French person who lives in the swamps.

To hunt raccoons.

To traverse by crawling, as a ledge.

To crawl while straddling, especially in crossing a creek.

There is a little ledge low on the face of the cliff, and by this with careful “cooning” one may reach a recession in the rock which makes a lovely arm chair.

2 o'clock we float up to Duvall's landing—high bluff, store house, and a few dwelling houses. Here the fleet stops. Now for a canter through the woods, cooning logs, and waiding sloughs. Slosh across a small prairie.

To fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.

To play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.

Rather than cooning or tomming it up to please whites...the black comic characters joked or laughed or acted the fool with one another. Or sometimes they used humor combatively to outwit the white characters.

If any other forties figure paralleled this humorous, graceful man in appeal it was the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who, like the Trotter, funneled his extraordinary physical gifts into mass entertainment for whites yet remarkably, considering the time, avoided cooning.

A surname.