Word: colored
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...averse to all duties that have to be performed regularly, I soon conceived a great prejudice against my mustache, and read all the medical books I could get hold of, to see if there was no antidote against it. I did not want to let it grow, because its color is a sort of magenta, and I had not then made up my mind to go to Harvard...
YOUR articles in the issue of February 26, on the Beacon Cup Regattas and the right of Harvard to the magenta as her distinguishing color, seemed to contain a few errors which an older memory than yours might correct...
...here we have certainly enough proof that Harvard wore in 1860 handkerchiefs of a color which the papers called red, - not an unnatural error at a time when magenta as the name of a color was little known beyond dry-goods' shops and the ladies. That these so-called red handkerchiefs were in truth of magenta, I have a pleasant reason for knowing, from having been made the object of some light feminine chaff about Harvard's taste in selecting so homely a color. In those days - as now indeed - we sometimes wore a straw hat with magenta ribbon...
Again, Union claimed the color in 1860. Before what tribunal? Where was it widely displayed? The color was claimed only by being worn by some of the students of Union. Now, who will deny the probability that a handkerchief or ribbon of the hue which is now called magenta was worn at some time by a student during the first two hundred and twenty years of Harvard's existence! Indeed, tradition reports that old John Harvard himself sported a deep crimson kerchief. Where, then, was Union...
...Union nails her color to the mast, we tremble before the awful probability that things will be mixed. There is little danger of a Harvard student's being taken for a Union man, except by those who were "raised" in the immediate vicinity of - we believe it is Schenectady? - but the Union students may expect to be often taken for Cantabs, next summer, and must cultivate their modesty for the occasion...