LANGUAGE IS NEVER STAGNANT. The meaning and intent of words can change over time. That is the case with the word colored, which is not accepted today because it has evolved into a loaded word meant to be racist and hurtful.
Colored was once commonly used to refer to black or African American people. African Americans frequently used the word colored in Elizabeth Jennings’s era. The Colored American, for example, was a black newspaper in New York founded in 1837. Other examples of the use of the word by the African American community include the First Colored Presbyterian Church and First Colored American Congregational Church, churches in New York City. Frederick Douglass used the term colored in his publications, several of which are quoted from in this book.
Readers may also note that the term civil rights, which is a common phrase describing the struggle for equality among races, has been replaced with equal rights for blacks to avoid confusion. Historically civil rights is a term used mainly to describe the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, not the 1850s.
Some readers will no doubt be curious about the emphasis put on social class by the primary sources referred to or quoted from in this book, including Elizabeth Jennings, who refers to herself as “respectable” and “genteel.” This was typical of the way members of the middle class, both white and black, described themselves in the era.
Other words, archaic in meaning today, are explained in the text or in footnotes when needed.