Setting Emacs 24 background color/theme?

[Alex Gittens]

Hi all,

I'm new to Emacs, and trying to find a nice theme for prolonged typing. I 
installed Emacs 24 b/c it has built-in color themeing support, but it doesn't 
seem to be working correctly.

If I use the Emacs menu Options->Customize Emacs->Custom Themes, then the 
foreground color changes to the theme colors, but the background remains white 
in the GUI of Emacs and gray in the console version of Emacs. 

How can I fix this?