Actually I didn't find it, my post is based upon research by Fred Shapiro (editor of the The Yale Book of Quotations, and a highly respected language researcher), but that's beside the point.

It's pretty standard practice in etymology to research the history of a word by finding all the earliest usages of it, and that's what Fred did in this case. And the early usages pointed towards a "black hat" usage.

Etymologists don't normally use evidence based upon individual memory due to people being very bad at remember exact word usages from decades ago. A few years ago I did some work for the Oxford English Dictionary and while they would use people's memory to guide them to potential recorded sources of evidence, they wouldn't use someones memory alone due to the problems inherent with it.

Especially in a emotionally charged issues like this one where people are likely to "want" to remember things being a certain way.

btw, the poor academic form thing was about wikipedia (from whom which we would expect a reasonale academic form), not you personally, sorry if it came across that way.