"Negro" superseded "colored" as the most polite terminology, at a time when "black" was more offensive. This usage was accepted as normal, even by people classified as Negroes, until the later Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s. One well-known example is the identification by Martin Luther King, Jr. of his own race as 'Negro' in his famous 1963 speech I Have a Dream.
During the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, some black American leaders in the United States, notably Malcolm X, objected to the word "Negro" because they associated the word Negro with the long history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination that treated African Americans as second class citizens, or worse. (Malcolm X preferred "Black" to "Negro", but also started using the term "Afro-American" after leaving the Nation of Islam.
Since the late 1960s, various other terms have been more widespread in popular usage. These include "black", "Black African", "Afro-American" (in use from the late 1960s to 1990) and "African American" (used in the United States to refer to black Americans, peoples often referred to in the past as American Negroes).
The term "Negro" is still used in some historical contexts, such as in the name of the United Negro College Fund and the Negro league in sports.
The United States Census Bureau announced that "Negro" would be included on the 2010 United States Census, alongside "Black" and "African-American" because some older black Americans still self-identify with the term.
Negroid
In physical anthropology the term is one of the three general racial classifications of humans — Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Under this classification scheme, humans are divisible into broad sub-groups based on phenotypic characteristics such as cranial and skeletal morphology.
Let me be clear. Assuming the quote is correct, the word “Negro” isn’t racist in of itself. But the phrase “black people are in jail and abort their babies ‘because they never learned to pick cotton’”, that IS racist.
Sorry, it just is.