Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography

The Voices of the Dark Races

TheVoicesoftheDarkRaces H opkins tried to stay with the Colored American Magazine for a short time after its transfer to New York. Due to ill health, incipient arthritis, and disagreement with the new editorial policies, however, she returned to Boston after a few months. Whatever the case, her health did not prevent her from writing for the Voice of the Negro. Its editorial policies under J. Max Barber were rather radical and close to the position of W.E.B. Du Bois and thus agreed more with her own preferences. In late 1904 and early 1905 Hopkins published an essay, “The New York Subway,” and a six-month sociocultural survey, “The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century.” The editor announced her association with the journal in the November issue of 1904 by saying: “Miss Pauline E. Hopkins is a well-known literary star among the Boston magazine writers. By any amount of coaxing and begging and paying we have been able to secure her services as one of our regular contributors.” He adds, “Miss Hopkins was by far the best staff writer on the Colored American Magazine when it was published in Boston. She has made her mark and is entitled to be considered as one of the best young writers in the race. Be sure to see her first article. Miss Hopkins is no longer connected with the Colored American Magazine” (“Our Christmas Number,” Nov. 1904, 467). Hopkins ceased to publish in the Voice of the Negro after the July issue of 1905, but there is no explanation for this in the magazine itself. The Voice of the Negro repeated some of the successful editorial policies of the Colored American Magazine. It included, for example, a large number of articles by famous African American women. The July 1904 number even announced an entire issue devoted mainly to the voices of African American women in which they could answer “Mrs. Felton, Thomas Nelson Page, William Hannibal Thomas” and others about their unfair accusation of a lack of morality among colored women.1 There was also a large number of portraits of notable men and women, some fashion and society notes, and a serial novel by Gardner Goldsby called The Welding of the Link (July 1905 to July 1906). After the Atlanta Riot of 1906, the editors of the magazine were 111 112 Negotiations in Race and Gender accused of instigating racial violence. The October 1906 issue asked on its opening page, “Shall the Press Be Free?” and stated: “In certain parts of this country Truth is literally gagged and bound and lies dumb and helpless in the dust while the lie is haughty and mighty and wields the sceptre in all the regions round about” (391). J. Max Barber defended himself: “The Voice of the Negro has told the truth, the plain unvarnished truth for nearly three years in the city of Atlanta and the heart of the South. The time came when that section could no longer endure sound doctrine” (391). At the same time that she wrote for the Voice of the Negro, Hopkins selfpublished her historical treatise, A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants —with Epilogue. This treatise is Hopkins’s call for black nationalism and establishes her place in a line of writers who became famous for their Ethiopianism , a movement that tried to vindicate the early greatness of the African peoples and explain their achievements in the diaspora. In her “Dark Races” series and A Primer of Facts, Hopkins combines the gender question with the race problem and tries to negotiate her way within a central paradox of her time: the denial of race difference coupled with an emphasis on the special role of the African American. Hopkins must be seen as part of a pan-African, Ethiopianist, black nationalist movement, one of the few female writers who joined this discourse. With only a few women preceding her and only a few following her, Hopkins was a lonely female voice in the discourse about the negotiations between the past glory of the race, the many famous figures evolving from it, and the attempt to reconcile the present system of discrimination and injustice in the United States with signs of slow progress in race relations all over the world. In her writing about this subject, the racial idea always ends up being closely tied to the gender question. Several terms must be clari...