Color line (racism)

The term color line was originally used as a reference to the racial segregation that existed in the United States after the abolition of slavery. An article by Frederick Douglass titled "The Color Line" was published in the North American Review in 1881. The phrase gained fame after W. E. B. Du Bois’ repeated use of it in his book The Souls of Black Folk.

.At the First Pan-African Conference in London in July 1900, the delegates adopted an "Address to the Nations of the World", drafted by Du Bois and to which he was a signatory, that contained the sentence: "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line".[1]