Free people of color (French: gens de couleur libres [ʒɑ̃ də kulœʁ libʁ]; Spanish: gente de color libre) were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent in the Americas who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture.

They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed.

These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry.^{[citation needed]} Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.

A freed African slave was known as affranchi (lit. 'freed'). The term was sometimes meant to include the free people of color, but they considered the term pejorative since they had been born free.

The term gens de couleur libres (French: [ʒɑ̃ də kulœʁ libʁ] ("free people of color") was commonly used in France's West Indian colonies prior to the abolition of slavery. It frequently referred to free people of mixed African and European ancestry.

In British North America, the term free Negro was often used to cover the same class of people—those who were legally free and visibly of African descent.

By the late 18th century prior to the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue was legally divided into three distinct groups: free whites (who were divided socially between the plantation-class grands blancs and the working-class petits blancs); freedmen (affranchis), and slaves. More than half of the affranchis were gens de couleur libres; others were considered freed black slaves. In addition, maroons (runaway slaves) were sometimes able to establish independent small communities and a kind of freedom in the mountains, along with remnants of Haiti's original Taino people. A large group of surviving Native Tainos also supported the Haitian Revolution; they were known as "indiens esclaves" which numbered about 5,000. In a 1780 census, there was also a group listed as "indiens sauvages", which Haitian historians believe were the native Arawak and Taino that were known to live in tiny reclusive mountain communities at this point.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of independent Haiti and a leader of the Revolution, talked about people whom he called "Rouges" (reds), or sometimes "Incas" in his letters. When they were spoken about in context of the war, he makes mention of cooperation between Africans and Natives in maroon communities that plotted against colonists on the southern peninsula. He also discusses "Incas among his men" showing him secret burial quarters in the Artibonite valley that could be used by rebels as shelter and storage. There were 3,000 known Native peoples (both "esclaves" and "sauvages") living in Haiti in the years before independence, according to a 1802 colonial census.