Pauline Hopkins

Pauline Hopkins. Author, Editor and Publisher. , Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, a novelist and editor, was born in Portland, Maine, the daughter of Northrup and Sarah Hopkins. Among her mother's relatives was the Reverend Thomas Paul, the founder and first pastor of the African Meeting House on Joy Street in Boston., The Hopkins family moved to Boston when Pauline was a child. Educated in the public schools, she won a competition sponsored by the Cambridge African American author William Wells Brown with her essay, "The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedies.", Hopkins embarked on a literary career at age twenty-four with a musical drama that was performed in Boston, but she had to support herself by working as a stenographer. Twenty years later, her first novel, Contending Forces (1900), explored the struggles of a black middle-class family after the Civil War. It led to a stint as editor of the new Colored American magazine, which was published by the Colored Co-Operative Press in Boston., The magazine urged African Americans to know their own history and assert their rights. Hopkins herself wrote carefully researched biographies of famous African American men and women of the abolitionist era. Three of her novels were serialized in the magazine: Hagar's Daughters, A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice; Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest; and Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self. All dealt with interracial relationships, which led to cancellations by some white readers., The Colored American magazine was purchased secretly by Booker T. Washington in 1904. Hopkins, who was sympathetic to W.E.B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement, was relieved of her post. She started her own publishing firm, P. E. Hopkins and Co., in 1905 and later was the editor of New Era magazine in Boston. Neither venture was successful, and Hopkins returned to stenography., Hopkins bought this house with her parents in 1896 and continued to live here after her mother died in 1914. In 1916 Hopkins sold the property and moved to 19 Jay Street in Cambridgeport, where she lived until her death. She is buried in Chelsea, Massachusetts., Related Cambridge African American Trail Markers: , William Wells Brown, 29 Webster Avenue , WEB Du Bois, 20 Flagg Street , Rev. P. Thomas Stanford, 117 Dudley Street, Sources: , Colored American, Boston, 1900-1904 (photo, January 1901) , Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds. Dictionary of American Negro Biography, 1982 , Jessie C Smith, ed, Notable Black American Women 1992 , Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, 1988, Cambridge Discovery Inc. , Cambridge Historical Commission