A historical marker at 53 Clifton St., North Cambridge, marks the former home of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, the most prominent Black female writer in America at the turn of the 20th century. A novelist, journalist and playwright, Hopkins served from 1900 to 1904 as editor of the Colored American Magazine, a Boston-based monthly and America’s first Black literary periodical. In her work, Hopkins tackled issues of race relations, social history and the role of women. “She was really fundamental to the continued development of Black literature after the Civil War,” said Alisha Knight, an associate professor at Washington College, in a 2019 interview. During the years it was produced, the Colored American Magazine had the largest circulation of any publication aimed at a Black American readership. Hopkins served variously as the magazine’s literary editor, editor-in-chief and writer. “The reach of that publication across the country was really ahead of its time,” Knight said. The 88-page March 1903 issue, for example, included advertisements from businesses as far afield as Richmond, Virginia,. and East Saint Louis, Illinois.
Hopkins published her best-known work of fiction, “Contending Forces: a Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South,” in 1900. It was an epic historical novel that traced the experience of several generations of an African American family. Three more novels, serialized in the magazine, followed. In her literary work, Hopkins sought to provide Black middle-class readers with historical connections to the continent of Africa, links that were often missing from the lives of the descendants of the enslaved. “She understood what those of us who teach literature understand today, that literature helps people learn empathy,” Knight said.
Hopkins’ views often clashed with those of influential civil rights leader Booker T. Washington, and she blamed Washington for a takeover of the financially struggling magazine in 1904 that largely ended her literary career. The new publisher moved the editorial offices to New York City. At first, she moved with it. As she recalled in a 1905 letter to William Trotter, a Boston newspaper publisher and civil rights champion, “I was offered $12 per week which I decided to accept having determined that I would accept the situation as I found it, succumb to the powers that were, and do all I could to keep the magazine alive.” She was, however, forced to resign in September 1904.
Although she tried several times to contribute to or start new publications, she never again had as large an audience, and spent years struggling to reach any audience at all. In 1916, she started the New Era Magazine, which served as a forum for her ideas about racial progress, explored the history of Black America and its connections to the African continent and celebrated accomplished men and women of color. She worked out a detailed plan for New Era, lining up writers from Africa and elsewhere to contribute to future issues, but was unable to sustain the magazine financially; only two issues appeared. Hopkins sold her Clifton Street home in 1916 and moved into rented rooms on Jay Street in the Cambridgeport neighborhood, where she lived for the remainder of her life. From 1918 until her death in 1930 at the age of 71, she worked as a stenographer at MIT.
Hopkins’ work was rediscovered and popularized in the 1960s and she now has a well-deserved place in the canon of African-American writers, Knight noted. Today, a group of literary scholars called the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society fosters research and dialogue on Hopkins and her role in American literary history, and she has become one of the most widely discussed African-American novelists of the early 20th century.
History Cambridge co-hosts the free “Beyond Her Time: The Visionary Works of Pauline Hopkins,” at 6 p.m. Oct. 17, at the Cambridge Main Library, 449 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge. The event is in partnership with the Cambridge Public Library and the Cambridge Black History Project.
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Michael Kuchta is a volunteer with History Cambridge. This article contains material developed for “Born in Cambridge: 400 Years of Ideas and Innovators,” co-written by Kuchta and published by the MIT Press in 2022.
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