The Black Sash is a South African human rights organisation. It was founded in Johannesburg in 1955 as a non-violent resistance organisation for liberal white women.

Coloureds refers to members of multiracial ethnic communities in South Africa who may have ancestry from African, European, and Asian people. The intermixing of different races began in the Cape province of South Africa, with Dutch settlers, Bantu, and Malay slaves intermixing with the indigenous Khoi tribes of that region. Later various other European nationals also contributed to the growing mixed race people, who would later be officially classified as coloured by the apartheid government in the 1950s.