of color

Meaning

Adjective

• Nonwhite; of a race other than white, for example black.
• Belonging to a category of people with mixed black and white ancestry in the Americas in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Origin

• Attested since the late 1700s, initially in reference to a category of mixed-race (partially black, partially white) people in the Americas; compare French de couleur (attested since at least 1779 in gens de couleur), and was used by e.g. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963, around which time its modern meaning began to take shape. onward, reaching wide circulation by the 1990s.