Entry · catalog no. 1324
the color line
/ /ðə ˈkʌlər laɪn/ /thuh KUH-luh LYNE
noun phrase · Washington, D.C. and Atlanta; nationwide, and internationally after 1900 · 1880s
✓ Verified
1.
The social, legal and economic division drawn between Black Americans and white Americans — not a natural boundary but one made and maintained.
“Every institution in that town was arranged along the color line and everybody knew where it ran.”
2.
In Du Bois's formulation, the defining problem of the age: the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
“He wrote that in 1903 and it has been quoted at every anniversary since.”
Origin & Attribution
Put into circulation by Frederick Douglass in "The Color Line," published in The North American Review in June 1881, an essay that took apart the justifications offered for racial prejudice and compared the line itself to a disease of the moral sense. W. E. B. Du Bois made the phrase permanent twenty-two years later in The Souls of Black Folk, and again at the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London. Both men were Black writers naming a structure that white American speech preferred to leave unnamed.
1881
Frederick Douglass publishes The Color Line in The North American Review, June
1900
Du Bois uses the phrase in the address To the Nations of the World at the Pan-African Conference, London
1903
The Souls of Black Folk opens with the problem of the color line
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Washington, D.C. and Atlanta; nationwide, and internationally after 1900 · 1880s
Spoken by
Black journalists, scholars and orators from Reconstruction forward; standard in American historical writing
$THECOLThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady145 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
64/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1881
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Frederick Douglass, The Color Line, The North American Review, vol. 132, no. 295, June 1881, pp. 567–577
magazine essay · 1881
■
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago
book · 1903
■
+ Cite a sourceW. E. B. Du Bois, To the Nations of the World, Pan-African Conference, London
address · 1900
See also