Colored is a term once widely used in the United States to refer to black people (i.e., persons of sub-Saharan African ancestry; members of the "black race") and Native Americans. It should not be confused with the more recent term people of color, which generally refers to all "non-white peoples".
In other English-speaking countries, the term has varied meanings. In South Africa, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the term Coloured refers both to a specific ethnic group of complex mixed origins, which is considered neither black nor white, and in other contexts to people of mixed race; in neither context is its usage considered derogatory. In British usage, the term refers to "a person who is wholly or partly of non-white descent" and its use may be regarded as antiquated or offensive, and other terms are preferable, particularly when referring to a single ethnicity.
Read more about Colored: History in America
Famous quotes containing the word colored:
“Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man’s wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“My course is a firm assertion and maintenance of the rights of the colored people of the South according to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, coupled with a readiness to recognize all Southern people, without regard to past political conduct, who will now go with me heartily and in good faith in support of these principles.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.”
—Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)