I noticed that among this class of colored men the word 'nigger' was freely used in about the same sense as the word 'fellow,' and sometimes as a term of almost endearment but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men. The use of nigger non- pejoratively within the black community was documented in the 1912 book The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, in which he recounted a scene in New York City around the turn of the century:
