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The“ColoredAmericanMagazine” H er reputation as a performer and writer, a certain financial stability, and “grim determination”—as R. S. Elliott, a white man in charge of the technical management of the magazine in its early years, chose to call it (“The Story” 47)—allowed Pauline Hopkins to grasp one of the few opportunities available to her when the Colored American Magazine was founded in Boston in 1900. Elliott includes this information probably upon her request: “Pauline Hopkins has struggled to the position which she now holds in the same fashion that ALL Northern colored women have to struggle—through hardships, disappointments, and with very little encouragement. What she has accomplished has been done by a grim determination to ‘stick at it,’ even though failure might await her at the end.” Elliott then adds the laudatory sentence: “Let us have a few more Pauline Hopkins to help forward the brighter and better day for the race” (47). In the following discussion, the first part will be devoted to the Colored American Magazine in general and Hopkins’s involvement with it. It is necessary to know the basic facts about the Colored American Magazine in order to understand Hopkins’s role at and contribution to the magazine. In subsequent chapters, I will treat her use of pseudonyms and establish the fact that Hopkins used more pseudonyms than commonly attributed to her; analyze her negotiations with the “famous men” of her race, in particular with Booker T. Washington, which entails a detailed description of the sale of the magazine and its removal to New York; and, finally, discuss Hopkins’s involvement with the “famous women” of her race and investigate her opinions on race and racism. My premise is that Hopkins was at the center of crucial debates about the cultural politics of magazine editing, the cultural politics of radical activism, and the early feminist movement. She was on the scene when race consciousness was being redefined. I also argue that her negotiations of gender were never detached from her negotiations of race. In 1900 the Colored American Magazine was founded by Walter W. Wallace, Jesse W. Watkins, Harper S. Fortune, and Walter Alexander Johnson. Both 49 50 Negotiations in Race and Gender Wallace,themanagingeditor,andFortune,thetreasurer,hadabackgroundin music. All four founders came from Virginia, the place of origin of Hopkins’s stepfather and a sign of the migration north of many upwardly mobile African Americans. In his May 1901 article about the foundation of the magazine, Elliott describes them as exemplary men bent on achieving education and becoming successful businessmen (“The Story” 45–47). The magazine was published by the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, which also published four books, among them Hopkins’s first novel, Contending Forces. Hopkins was involved financially in this publishing company and contributed her share to the initial launching of the magazine. It was located at 232 West Canton Street in the South End, moved to 5 Park Street later the same year, and ended up at 82 West Concord Street in May– June 1903. The magazine was first issued in May 1900 and declared itself to be “devoted to the higher culture of Religion, Literature, Science, Music and Art of the Negro, universally” (“Announcement”). The first editorial and publisher’s announcement called for contributions from everyone interested in the race: “A vast and almost unexplored treasury of biography, history, adventure, tradition, folk lore poetry and song, the accumulations of centuries of such experiences as have never befallen any other people lies open to us and to you” (“Editorial,” May 1900, 60). The political purpose of the magazine was defined plainly: “What we desire, what we require, what we demand to aid in the onward march of progress and advancement is justice; merely this and nothing more” (61). According to Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson’s Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century, the Colored American Magazine was “the first significant Afro-American journal to emerge in the twentieth century” (4).1 The Colored American Magazine set out to be a quality journal similar to the Atlantic Monthly and saw itself as a magazine dedicated to the needs of a particular reading group: African Americans and as large a number of white sympathizers as possible. In a letter to Booker T. Washington in 1901, Walter Wallace indicates that one-third of the subscribers were white and that the magazine had a circulation between fifteen...

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