Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the Colored American Magazine

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), author of Contending Forces (1900), was the most prolific black woman writer of her time. Her work with the Colored American Magazine had no small part in earning her this distinction, for she published three serialized novels and several short stories and editorial pieces in the magazine. She abruptly stopped editing and contributing to the magazine in 1904, however. Some literary historians have assumed she left because Booker T. Washington purchased the journal and replaced her with one of his allies, and they dismiss the end of her tenure there as merely a casualty of the Tuskegee Machine. Hopkins's contemporary, W.E.B. Du Bois, theorized, with little elaboration, that Hopkins "was not conciliatory enough" toward white readers.¹ In his 1947 version of the publication's history, William Stanley Braithwaite, who worked directly with Hopkins as one of the Colored American Magazine's literary critics, chose not to comment on how readers responded to Hopkins's political ideas. Instead, he characterized Hopkins as a "temperamental editor" whose desire for "an independence of action in making selections, and a dignity in soliciting manuscripts of the best" caused "friction" in the magazine's work environment.² Indeed, considering his first-hand experiences with the magazine, Braithwaite's account is surprisingly devoid of details pertaining to the challenges Hopkins faced as she maneuvered the periodical publication process. As a result, scholars continue to speculate why she left and under what circumstances.³ By revisiting the case, I will show how Hopkins's defiant nature (which has either been misread or overlooked) and her radical ideology about the role of literature in the early twentieth-century racial uplift movement constitute a subversive subtext in the articles she wrote and the editorial decisions she made for the Colored American Magazine. Hopkins was more antagonistic towards Booker T. Washington and his supporters than previously believed. Unlike former approaches, which do not utilize primary sources, especially Hopkins's own voice, my analysis examines her private and public writings to solve the mystery of the disappearing journal editor.⁴

From 1900 to 1904, Hopkins was a dedicated contributor to the Colored American Magazine, and she rose to the rank of literary editor in May 1903. Hopkins was also a member of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, the firm that published the magazine and her first novel, Contending Forces. In 1904 Hopkins helped found the Colored American League and worked to raise subscriptions and funding for the periodical. Despite Hopkins and the League's efforts to sustain the periodical, it was sold to Fred R. Moore in the spring of 1904. At the time, Moore was known to be one of Washington's allies who received various degrees of assistance from him. It was Washington who actually orchestrated the purchase of the magazine and moved it from Boston to New York.⁵ When the magazine was moved to New York, Hopkins was demoted from editor to assistant editor, and Moore was installed at the head of the publication. The November 1904 Publishers' Announcements states that Hopkins left the magazine because of poor health.⁶ The magazine's explanation for her departure is highly questionable, since her work appeared in a rival publication a month later. When Hopkins left the magazine in 1904, she attempted to continue her writing career by contributing the series "The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century" and the article "The New York Subway" to the Voice of the Negro. Later, in 1905, she established her own publishing venture, Pauline E. Hopkins and Company, and published A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants, with Epilogue. In 1916 she attempted to start another magazine, New Era, which unfortunately lasted only two issues. After this magazine failed, Hopkins retreated from public life and resumed her work as a stenographer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It appears that by the time Hopkins died on August 13, 1930, her important work as an...