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TheLateYears I n her study of Boston’s black upper class, Adelaide Hill Cromwell calls the period between 1830 and about 1910 or 1915 “the period of integration” (197). This time can be divided into a “stage of protest,” which began with the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison in 1831 and lasted till the end of the Civil War. It was followed by a “stage of florescence,” during which the African American community “realized sufficient political and economic achievement to have justified the fondest hopes of Garrison, Phillips, Douglass, Hayden, Sumner, and other liberals.” It furthered the development of an upper class, which “measured up to standards of the prevailing community, regional, or national upper class.” A subsequent “period of decline,” however, set in at about 1910 for two reasons: “the lack of supporting interest in the Negro within the larger society and the Negro community’s inability to resolve its own problems.” The African American upper class, Cromwell argues, were “unable to meet directly the challenges in their own structure produced by the sudden invasion of foreign-born and southern-born Negroes and were further confused by observing a different and unfamiliar alignment of forces within the majority structure” (198). Hopkins’s late years can be dated from about 1916, when she failed with the New Era Magazine, to her death in 1930. It is the period in which growing age, financial problems, and probably physical ailment made it difficult for her to be as active as before. It corresponds with the period of decline that Cromwell locates on the local level in Boston and with a number of international agendas that did not further a climate of tolerance between the races, classes, and sexes in the United States. John Hope Franklin writes about the year before the United States formally joined the First World War: “Lynchings and other forms of violence increased, to add to the concern of Negroes. In 1916 Jesse Washington was publicly burned in Waco, Texas, before a cheering mob of thousands of men, women, and children. In South Carolina a well-to-do Negro farmer, Anthony Crawford, was mobbed and killed for ‘impudence’ in refusing to agree to a 277 278 Voices and Silences price for his cottonseed. In Mexico twenty-two Negroes of the Tenth Cavalry were killed while on a mission pursuing a deserter” (335). Tulsa also witnessed a devastating race riot, the aftermath of which Franklin observed firsthand, in 1921. While service in the armed forces did not solve the problems of discrimination and segregation, the economic situation on the home front came to depend on African American labor (see Franklin 333–53). An increasingly large number of southerners moved to the industrial regions of the North. And yet the return of African American troops to the United States did not lead to a “wholesale distribution of the blessings of liberty” (355). The Red Summer of 1919 told of growing unrest and disappointment. The defeat of the Dyer antilynching bill, close investigations into the causes of mob violence, the Garvey movement, and the beginning of a recession in the middle of the twenties certainly influenced the lives of African Americans all over the country. Franklin calls this part of his history book “Democracy Escapes” (354–71). Passionately committed as she was to racial uplift, black history, and the concerns of colored women, Hopkins’s life lost its momentum after the failure of the New Era Magazine. The years of relative silence about her between 1905 and 1916, and the years of absolute silence from 1916 to 1930, cannot be reconstructed. The only references are to the lives of her contemporaries, especially to those of Trotter and Chesnutt, whose careers can be compared with hers to some extent. Further sidelights on the lives of Sutton E. Griggs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Anna Julia Cooper illuminate indirectly the creativity and silence of Hopkins. In addition, this chapter will also investigate the possible developments in literature that led to a negative evaluation of this period and this generation. The answer that evolves most clearly can be found in the assessment of a number of critics and in a combination of a shift in paradigms, the rise of the “New Negro,” the central role of Harlem, and a prejudice toward gender and an older generation. The “independent racial militant” William Monroe Trotter was especially renowned for his participation in the Boston riot in July 1903 (Fox 281). Trotter...

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