No Coursera, BSTs Red-Black (2012) , Robert Sedgewick diz o seguinte:
A lot of people ask why did we use the name red–black. Well, we
invented this data structure, this way of looking at balanced trees,
at Xerox PARC which was the home of the personal computer and many
other innovations that we live with today entering[sic] graphic user
interfaces, ethernet and object-oriented programmings[sic] and many
other things. But one of the things that was invented there was laser
printing and we were very excited to have nearby color laser printer
that could print things out in color and out of the colors the red
looked the best. So, that’s why we picked the color red to distinguish
red links, the types of links, in three nodes. So, that’s an answer to
the question for people that have been asking.