In the English language, the word negro is a term historically used to denote people considered to be of Black African heritage. The word negro means the color black in both Spanish and in Portuguese, where English took it from. The term can be construed as offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral, largely depending on the region or country where it is used, as well as the time period and context in which it is applied. It has various equivalents in other languages of Europe.
Prevalence of negro as a demonym has varied in American English. All-Negro Comics was a 1947 comic anthology written by African-American writers and featuring black characters.
"Negritos o Aetas" illustration in Bosquejo Geográfico e Histórico-natural del Archipielago Filipino (Ramón Jordana y Morera, 1885)
Street plate in Medina of Tunis showing, in Arabic and French, Negroes street
Negroid is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). The term is derived from now-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category.
Illustrations of "racial types" from The New Student's Reference Work (1914), edited by Chandler B. Beach and Frank Morton McMurry
