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.
The phrase sees current usage as a reference to modern racial discrimination in the United States and legalized segregation after the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement.
At that event General Horace Porter referred to the color line as being the result of being in battle alongside black troops in Virginia which his audience found humorous.
'In all walks of life the Negro is liable to meet some objection to his presence or some discourteous treatment; and the ties of friendship or memory seldom are strong enough to hold across the color line.
Many decades later, in 1952, nine years before he moved to Ghana,[8] Du Bois wrote an essay for Jewish Life magazine about his experiences during a trip to Poland and his changing attitude toward his phrase "the color-line".
In the first place, the problem of slavery, emancipation and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind a separate and unique thing as I had so long conceived it.
He goes on to write: "No, the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.
"[9] These quotations are of note because they reflect an expansion of Du Bois’ original definition of the color-line to include discrimination beyond that of color discrimination, Du Bois also pared down his definition to acknowledge that the "problem of the color-line" as he initially imagined it existed in the United States and did not manifest itself identically across the world.
Holloway, a professor of English at Duke University, centered her keynote address to the National Conference of Researchers of English on this sentence, saying: "Perhaps while sitting in his den or maybe in the midst of academic clutter at his university office, Du Bois penned the epic words that will center my reflections in this essay – 'The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
For example, Newsweek published a piece by Anna Quindlen entitled "The Problem of the Color Line," about the continuing plague of racial discrimination in the United States.
During a religious meeting – the Azusa Street Revival – held in Los Angeles from 1906 to 1909, the journalist, observer, and early adherent Frank Bartleman famously said, "It seemed that everyone had to go to “Azusa.” ...