For those interested in the topic of the history of color prejudice, here are two books by Dr. Frank Snowden that books that I found very informative:

Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks
by Frank M. Snowden

and

Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience
By Frank Snowden,Professor Emeritus, Department of Classics, Howard University.

The following is a review of "Blacks in Antiquity":

"According to Professor Emeritus Frank M. Snowden Jr., (AB, AM, Ph.D., ) Howard University Classicist Department... the Ethiopians "pioneered" religion, and were key to the origin and propagation of many of the customs which existed in Egypt. The Egyptians, it was argued, were descendants of the Ethiopians. Snowden states that the term Kushites, Nubians, or Ethiopians is to used in much the same way as the modern term "colored", "black, or Negro". "The experiences of Africans who reached the alien shores of Greece and Italy constituted an important chapter in the history of classical antiquity," he writes. "Using evidence from terra cotta figures, paintings, and classical sources like Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, Snowden proves, contrary to our modern assumptions, that Greco-Romans did not view Africans with racial contempt. Many Africans worked in the Roman Empire as musicians, artisans, scholars, and generals as well as slaves, and they were noted as much for their virtue as for their appearance of having a "burnt face" (from which came the Greek name Ethiopian)."

-snip-

Also, see this review of "Before Color Prejudice"
"Further developing the themes he so eloquently outlines in Blacks in Antiquity, Frank M. Snowden Jr. continues his investigations into attitudes towards Africans in the classical civilizations of Rome and Greece. Snowden identifies the African blacks from Egypt, Nubia (the modern Sudan), Ethiopia, and Carthage (Tunisia), discussing their interactions--including intermarriage--with the Greco-Romans. (He also notes that many of the artistic representations of these people resemble present-day African Americans.) From the trade missions of the Egyptian dynasties to their conquest of the Mediterranean and ultimate downfall at the hands of the Romans, Snowden unravels a complex history of cultural exchanges that went on for several millennia in which racial prejudice was not a factor. "There was a clear-cut respect among the Mediterranean peoples for Ethiopians and their way of life," he writes, "and above all, the ancients did not stereotype blacks as primitives defective in religion and culture." --Eugene Holley Jr.

Book Description

In this richly illustrated account of black-white contacts from the Pharaohs to the Caesars, Frank Snowden demonstrates that the ancients did not discriminate against blacks because of their color. For three thousand years Mediterranean whites intermittently came in contact with African blacks in commerce and war, and left a record of these encounters in art and in written documents. The blacks--most commonly known as Kushites, Ethiopians, or Nubians--were redoubtable warriors and commanded the respect of their white adversaries. The overall view of blacks was highly favorable. In science, philosophy, and religion color was not the basis of theories concerning inferior peoples. And early Christianity saw in the black man a dramatic symbol of its catholic mission.

This book sheds light on the reasons for the absence in antiquity of virulent color prejudice and for the difference in attitudes of whites toward blacks in ancient and modern societies."

http://www.amazon.com/Before-Color-Prejudice-Ancient-Blacks/dp/0674063813