The truth is that English-speaking people in the United States have used “people of color” as a category since at least the 1700s. French-speakers in Louisiana also used the French translation of this term, “gens de couleur.” The concept also existed outside of the United States in other parts of the English-speaking world and French colonies, such as Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti) and Ille of France (modern-day Mauritius). “Black” has an even longer history in the English language as a category to describe people. Scholars such as Onyeka Nubia and Miranda Kaufmann have found usages of “Black” and other related terms going back to the days of England’s Tudor period.
There is nothing new about “people of color” or its use as a broad catch-all category. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans frequently used “people of color” and “colored people” interchangeably to capture a diversity of people whose communities did not view them as “white.” Scholars, such as the late Jack D. Forbes, have shown how these categories included people of African descent as well as Indigenous Americans. The Supreme Court of North Carolina included both “negro” and “Indian” origins when defining the concept as part of the 1850s State v. Chavers court case. Even the United States Colored Troops, segregated units for people of color, included individuals born in places as diverse as India, China, and Africa along with numerous US-born troops.1
It is especially important to note that “people of color” and “colored people” were not simply terms imposed by white elites on other people. Many so-called “people of color” actually embraced these terms. For much of American history, these terms have been preferred terms. When establishing their community organizations, nineteenth-century Philadelphians explicitly referred to themselves as “free men of color,” “free women of color,” or “people of color.” This language appears in charters for such organizations as the Angolian Society, the Daughters of Zion or Angolian Ethiopian Society of Philadelphia, and the African Methodist Episcopal Wesley Church. Even nineteenth-century political activists used these terms. In 1832, Reverend David Nickens, an Ohio civil rights activist, delivered a speech titled “An Address to the People of Color in Chillicothe,” in which he called for a “union” among “people of color” as an “oppressed people.”2