I’ve gotten sick of looking this up everytime I change my desktop theme or colors.  Gnome really needs to make this an easy option somewhere in the preferences:

HOWTO Change Gnome Panel Text & Handle Color

Create an empty file called .gtkrc-2.0 in /home

If you already have a .gtkrc-2.0 then just add the code to your existing file.

Paste the following code inside:

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style "panel"
{
   bg[NORMAL]     = "#000000"
   fg[NORMAL]      = "#FFFFFF"
}
widget "PanelWidget" style "panel"
widget "PanelApplet" style "panel"
class "Panel" style "panel"
widget_class "Mail" style "panel"
class "notif" style "panel"
class "Notif" style "panel"
class "Tray" style "panel"
class "tray" style "panel"

bg[NORMAL] is what defines your Gnome panel handles color, simply add the hex code for the color that you require.
- you will probably want it to match the colour of your Gnome panels.

fg[NORMAL] is what defines your Gnome panel text colour, again simply add the hex code for the colour that you require.

Now save the file, logout and back in and you should see the changes take effect.

via HOWTO Change Gnome Panel Text & Handle Colour – Ubuntu Forums.

Instead of logging out and back in you can just kill gnome-panel. It’ll restart automatically:

killall gnome-panel

Now my screen looks like this:

Screenshot