Definition
A historical legal classification denoting Black people, persons of African descent, or persons of mixed African ancestry. As used in American law through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "colored people" and the equivalent phrase "persons of color" referred primarily to individuals of African descent, whether of unmixed or mixed ancestry. The term carried legal weight in jurisdictions that conditioned rights, status, and legal capacity on racial classification, including laws governing marriage, testimony, suffrage, property ownership, and access to public accommodations.
The phrase does not carry a fixed technical definition that travels uniformly across jurisdictions or time periods. Its meaning was determined contextually — by statute, by judicial construction, and by local social practice — and varied considerably depending on the degree-of-ancestry rules a given state applied.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Colored" as applied to people is now widely considered offensive or archaic in American English. The phrase "people of color" has been reclaimed in contemporary social and political discourse as an inclusive term for non-white persons generally, extending well beyond persons of African descent.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 defines "colored" (as applied to persons) as "having a skin color other than the white; specifically, of negro or mixed negro and white blood." This reflected contemporary ordinary American usage.
The gap between historical common usage and legal usage is narrower than for many terms, but it is not trivial. In ordinary nineteenth-century speech, "colored" was loosely applied. In law, the phrase triggered specific statutory consequences that required courts to define its boundaries precisely — particularly where mixed ancestry was at issue. Legal definitions often turned on fractional blood quantum rules or presumptions that common usage simply did not address.
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Common Confusion
Do not confuse "colored people" or "person of color" with the unrelated legal term "color of title." The word "color" in "color of title" derives from the Latin *color* meaning apparent form or semblance, and refers to a document or instrument that appears on its face to convey title but is legally defective. The two phrases share no legal relationship. The proximity of "color of title" in legal research databases and encyclopedias can produce misleading search results when researching the racial classification term.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter this term primarily in three contexts: antebellum statutes and case law governing the legal disabilities of free Black persons; Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation and its judicial construction; and post-Reconstruction segregation law, including legislation challenged and ultimately dismantled under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The term's instability is a significant research trap. No single national definition governed. Southern states frequently enacted "one-drop" rules or fractional blood quantum statutes defining who counted as "colored" for legal purposes, and these statutes changed over time. A case decided under one state's definition of "person of color" may be of limited precedential or analogical value in another jurisdiction. Always identify the operative statutory definition in force at the time and place relevant to your research.
In records from the colonial period and early republic, "person of color" sometimes encompassed free persons of Native American or other non-European ancestry, particularly in jurisdictions with significant mixed-race populations. Do not assume the term maps cleanly onto a single racial category across all historical sources.
For Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction materials, the term appears heavily in cases construing the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, the Fourteenth Amendment, and state civil rights statutes. Pay attention to how courts in different periods defined the protected class: some opinions treated "colored" as synonymous with "Negro" or "African descent," while others applied broader or narrower readings depending on the legal question at hand.
Researchers working with census records, wills, deeds, or court records from the nineteenth century will find the term applied inconsistently by individual clerks and recorders, sometimes reflecting local custom rather than statutory definition. Cross-reference against the operative state law before drawing conclusions about an individual's recorded legal status.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines "colored people" as "Black people, Africans or their descendants, mixed or unmixed," and states that "person of color" means "of African descent," citing a Mississippi decision and an encyclopedia of law. This is a characteristically compressed Bouvier entry — it captures the dominant judicial usage but does not surface the jurisdictional variation in blood quantum rules or the colonial-era usage that sometimes extended the phrase to other non-white groups.
Bouvier's definition reflects the mainstream judicial consensus of the late nineteenth century: courts generally treated "person of color" as referring to African descent. The cited Mississippi authority underscores that this was a southern judicial construction, shaped by the particular legal needs of slave-state jurisprudence. Researchers should treat Bouvier's entry as a useful baseline while recognizing that it presents a tidier picture than the historical record supports. The definition does not address how courts resolved borderline ancestry cases, which in practice required engagement with state-specific fractional ancestry statutes or common-law presumptions.
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Jurisdictional Note
Definition and application varied significantly by state. States with formal blood quantum statutes imposed specific fractional ancestry thresholds; others relied on judicial construction or community reputation. The legal consequences attached to the classification also varied — some states restricted testimony, marriage, or property rights; others focused on public accommodation or suffrage. Federal civil rights law from 1866 onward imposed a floor, but state-level variation in classification rules persisted well into the twentieth century.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia entry on Adverse Possession — Color of Title and Claim of Right addresses the unrelated doctrine of "color of title." It is listed here solely to flag the terminological collision identified under Common Confusion above. It has no substantive connection to the racial classification term defined in this entry.
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