The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

His anonymity reinforces the book's presentation as a supposedly authentic life history and makes his divided identity central to the narrative. James Weldon Johnson initially published the novel anonymously in 1912.

Passing means that the light-skinned narrator chooses to live publicly as a white man. The decision gives him safety and economic opportunity but requires him to conceal his family background and abandon part of his identity.

After witnessing a lynching in the South, he becomes terrified of the danger attached to being publicly identified as Black. He gives up his musical project and eventually enters white society, a choice he later describes with deep regret.

The narrator is a gifted pianist who performs ragtime in New York and hopes to transform Black musical traditions into concert art. His musical career connects the novel to the cultural world that preceded the Harlem Renaissance.