Definition
In American legal usage, "colored" was employed to designate persons of African descent, including individuals of mixed racial ancestry who had any Black African lineage. The term appeared in statutes, court decisions, and official documents from the colonial period through the mid-twentieth century, primarily in the context of race-based legal classifications that determined access to schools, public accommodations, voting rights, marriage eligibility, and civil status generally.
The word carried a distinct technical function in law: it served as the operative racial classification in segregation-era legislation, triggering the separate legal regimes that governed Black Americans under systems of formal discrimination. Courts were sometimes called upon to adjudicate who qualified as "colored" for statutory purposes, producing legal tests — some based on ancestry fraction, others on social recognition or appearance — that varied by jurisdiction and shifted over time.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Having a color; having prominent colors; biased or influenced in a particular way; of a skin color other than white; belonging to a multiracial ethnic group recognized under apartheid-era South African classification.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Having color; tinged or dyed; specious or plausible in appearance; of some color other than white; specifically applied to persons of African descent or those of non-white complexion.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is not a difference in definition but in consequence. Where ordinary usage described appearance or tint, the legal use of "colored" in American law was an operative term of art that activated specific statutory disabilities, exclusions, and in some contexts separate legal protections. The word did not merely describe; it classified — and classification carried enforceable legal weight.
Common Confusion
"Colored" should not be confused with "color" in its separate legal sense. "Color of law," "color of title," and "colorable" are unrelated legal concepts in which "color" means an appearance or semblance of legal right, derived from Latin and common-law usage. A researcher encountering "color" in a property or civil rights context must determine immediately which usage is present: the racial classification term or the "semblance of right" family of concepts. The two appear in entirely different doctrinal contexts and should not be conflated.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter "colored" across several distinct doctrinal areas and time periods, and the term's meaning and legal function shifted substantially depending on era and jurisdiction.
In nineteenth-century sources, "colored" was used in statutes and cases governing school segregation, testimony competency, marriage, and inheritance. Courts were frequently required to define the term's outer boundaries — particularly for persons of mixed ancestry — producing a body of definitional case law that is jurisdiction-specific and sometimes internally inconsistent. The Ohio, Virginia, Mississippi, and federal cases cited in Black's 2nd Edition illustrate this: different courts applied different ancestry thresholds.
By the mid-twentieth century, "colored" persisted in the names of civil rights organizations (e.g., the NAACP, founded 1909) and in some statutory language, even as the underlying racial classification system was being challenged and dismantled. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, race-based statutory distinctions using this vocabulary were rendered unconstitutional in most applications, but the term survives in historical legal texts that remain part of the active research record.
A significant trap in historical sources: the term was not uniformly defined. Some statutes defined "colored" to include any person with a fraction of African ancestry (one-eighth, one-quarter thresholds appear in various state codes); others relied on community recognition or physical appearance. Researching the specific definition operative in a given jurisdiction and period is essential — do not assume uniformity.
The term also appears in a completely separate doctrinal family ("color of title," "colorable claim") that has no racial content. Always verify context before indexing or analyzing a source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) treats the term as descriptive of existing usage rather than as a term of art requiring formal definition: "By common usage in America, this term... is used to designate negroes or persons of the African race, including all persons of mixed blood descended from negro ancestry." The entry acknowledges that the definition was judicially elaborated rather than legislatively fixed, citing cases from Ohio, federal courts, Virginia, and Mississippi to illustrate the consensus view.
What Black's does not address — and what historical legal dictionaries generally omit — is the doctrinal machinery the term activated: the body of "racial integrity" statutes, segregation codes, and disenfranchisement provisions in which "colored" was the operative trigger. Historical dictionaries record usage; they do not catalog the legal consequences that usage produced. Researchers must look to statutory compilations and case law reporters of the relevant period for that picture.
Black's also does not address the jurisdictional variation in definitional thresholds, which is a significant omission given that litigation over who counted as "colored" was common in courts across the South and Midwest.
Jurisdictional Note
The definition and legal consequences of "colored" varied meaningfully by state. Southern states maintained explicit racial classification statutes with differing ancestry thresholds and enforcement mechanisms. Northern states used the term in school segregation statutes that were repealed or invalidated at different times. Federal law's engagement with the term was primarily through Reconstruction-era legislation and later civil rights law. Researchers cannot assume that a definition operative in Virginia governed in Ohio or Mississippi.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
For the unrelated "color of title" doctrine in property law: Adverse Possession — Color of Title and Claim of Right (The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia).