Sentence:  The church fathers allegorized biblical references to Ethiopians (in the LXX and New Testament) as symbols for sin, going so far as to depict devils as black Ethiopians; nevertheless, historians still view them as inheritors of the classical literary tradition that employed black-white color symbolism to represent good and evil instead of as <WSD>proto-racists</WSD>. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A person who displays protoracist attitudes or behaviors.