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The iron heel of oppression is everywhere. It has reached every section of this country, and every black citizen has a duty to perform. Cultured men and women of color and convention assembled sit in silence while one side of this burning question is discussed, the white side, and we are solemnly impressed with the magnitude of our wickedness and hopeless depravity by partisan white and colored speakers. It has reached the past where the educated black will handle any
subject in his assemblies. But Politics South and its friends have said, not a word of complaint, no talk of lynching, not an offensive word, or it will go hard with you, and the race leaders have bowed to that decree an abject submission. What are we going to do about it? Stick to principle?
Katie?
Do you have a guest as to when that quote I just read was written?
Based on the subject matter, it could have been written today based on how it's written, I can tell you know what is not an Instagram.
Post fair very fair well.
It was self published in nineteen oh five, but definitely the subtitle of the pamphlet that this quote comes from is super long, but in short, it's titled A Primer of Facts. This part and other parts of that study feel like they could have been plucked from the present and is by our Woman of the Hour, I'm Katie and I'm Eves today's episode Rediscovering the Pauline Hopkins. Katie, I love stories about black writers whose legacies were buried by time and then unearthed by dedicated scholars.
You know I do too. There's so much promise and possibility in the fact that there have been and will be more Black writers whose work will be given new life.
And we are better for it.
We're also fortunate because a lot of the time that work is lost, and a lot of Pauline Hopkins's work and words survive. But sadly, Pauline died tragically after being injured in a fire. But she was seventy one when she died, so she got to live a life that was pretty full of artistic exploration. She acted, sang, and
she wrote plays, short stories and novels. She was also an editor for the Colored American Magazine, which was, by its own definition and illustrated monthly devoted to literature science, music, art, religion, facts, fiction, and traditions of.
The Negro race. It's a lot earth everything.
And she wrote biographical sketches of famous Black people in the magazine, and she helped build its connections to Payan African intellectuals and its interest in global issues.
And she published some short stories and serialized her novels in the magazine.
Right, yeah, she did plenty of them. Her novels Hagard's Daughter, a story of Southern cast prejudiced and Winona, a tale of Negro life in the South and Southwest, and lastly of One Blood or the Hidden Self were all serialized in the magazine. And if you can't tell what type of time she was on by the quote from earlier or the titles of her novels, Pauline's fiction was about the struggles that Black Americans had to go through because
of our race. They were about slavery and reconstruction and division between the North and the South, and they were about understanding the pain and horror of our past to move forward as a race and as a country.
Pauline was clearly prolific and a woman of many gifts. Would you say her work put her squarely in the camp of literary pioneers.
Yeah, I think so. She did her fair share of trailblazing when she was in her twenties. In the eighteen seventies, she became the first Black woman to write and star in her own dramatic work, a musical play called Slave's Escape or the Underground Railroad. The play was later retitled Peculiar Sam. Her book Contending Forces, a romance illustrative of Negro life North and South, was published in October of nineteen hundred and it was the first twentieth century novel
by a Black American woman. Pauline constantly connected romance and politics in her fiction. As Lois Brown says in her two thousand and eight book Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Black Daughter of the Revolution, Pauline quote used sentimental romance to advance her campaign for racial justice, and the Colored American has its own fascinating history. It was one of the first, if not the first, magazine devoted to Black American arts, literature, and culture in the United States, and Pauline was the
only woman on staff when it launched. And then Take Hagar's Daughter, which was published serially from nineteen oh one to nineteen oh two. It made her the first known Blackmai woman to publish a work of detective fiction. It also made her the creator of the first known Black American female detective. All of Pauline's fiction, nonfiction, and editorial work with the magazine helped grow her status and recognition
in black literary and activist circles. Her work did get some criticism, though more on that After the Break, some people considered Pauline an agitator. They were critical of the candidness with which she talked about taboo subjects like sexual violence, of her frank condemnation of practices like lynching and imperialism, her clarity in linking issues of race with issues of class,
and her refusal to mince words in her expression. There were folks who were not a fan of how defiant and outspoken she was in her mission to uplift the race, and on the other side of the coin, some of our faith eves flamed her.
We love to see some hate, don't we?
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Okay, she has some choice words about Pauline and the afterward. To the nineteen seventy eight reprint of Contending Forces, Brooks says this often doth the brainwashed slave revere the modes and idolatries of the master, and Pauline Hopkins consistently proves herself a continuing slave despite little bursts of righteous heat throughout Contending Forces.
Oh my gosh, she ate her.
It really is to call someone.
A slave, continuing slave.
They weren't that far away from times of slavery either.
Wait what what I'm trying to think? What year was that? Did she write continu.
Oh no, this this, she didn't write. Contending Forces came out in the early nineteen hundreds.
And then this was a reprint. Yes, this is an afterward to their reprint. Because Pauline Hopkins herself when she was alive, wasn't it wasn't that far away? She wrote in afterwards of her.
Book, isn't that Yes, says that, yes, that's crazy, that it's shady.
But it feels like it's a backwards compliment in a way, because well, no, it's not a backwards compliment. I meant that the other way around. It's a criticism first, and then she tries to tackle on a little bit of the compliment where at the end, where she says, despite little bursts of righteous heat, girl, it's shady though, you know it's shady.
No, somebody did that to me, I literally writes out of my grave.
Yeah, well, let.
It be known to all people who have plans of flaming Katie in the future after her books come out.
No, because whoever is in charge of her estate was like they approve that.
Yeah, to be fair, I don't know who's or has been in charge of her estate, so I'm not sure how tight they were about like making sure that everything goes out is buttoned.
Up clearly, not at all?
Right, And sometimes Pauline did use a pen name so she didn't have to catch all of that heat. Two pseudonyms she used repeatedly were Sarah A. Allen, her mother's name, and Jay Shirley Shadrag Shadrag Menkins was the name of a man who escaped slavery, was captured under the Fugitive Slave Law, and was later freed by black folks. His story was a well known one in Boston, and Hopkins once wrote about him in a profile of abolitionist Lewis Hayden.
In cases where she wrote about touchy subjects like interracial marriage, Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, and the moral ills of white society. She chose to use one of her pen names, but it wasn't always about dodging the ire of benefactors and people who had more conventional opinions. Sometimes using a pseudonym meant that she could squeeze more of her work into one.
Issue of The Colored American. Why are you laughing?
I love a innovative queen. She's practical, right, she was like, Yes, Sarah A. Allen wrote this, Jare she's drag and probably Hopkins.
Yeah, all three different women. I know. I do love that.
I think that that wasn't an uncommon thing to do at the time, you know, But I think it's funny because.
It allowed her to write more.
But it also makes me wonder, like, were there not other people that could write for the magazine, that could like have stuff that would be good as well to be placed in it.
They're definitely worried, but it's probably much harder to get to people in the early nineteen hundreds. I imagine even the literacy rate was probably very low.
Yeah, that's fair.
So she did what she had to do. She put the whole magazine on her back.
Indeed, and in general, pen names were common in the early nineteen hundreds, so they were often used in the Colored American even by people outside of Pauline, and in other black publications as well. Authors would hide behind different identities if they had recognizable names, were divulging personal information in their writing, or if they wanted to fill out the response to their writing before publishing their own name on it.
That's fair too, you know. I feel like I wish we had the leeway to do stuff like this. What you mean you think so?
Yeah, I guess so, because you can really publish anywhere and self published so easily these days. They'll find out who it was, though, the people.
Will you know that book Autobiography of ex color Man. Yeah, so James wald and Johnson wrote it, but he made it like it was a true autobiography when it's really a novel and was like, oh yeah, like I didn't write that it was this man's story. But of course people found him out. But I like people were just like just silly, goofy mood.
Good.
Yeah, like this is performance art as well.
Yeah.
The thing about Pauline's work, though, is that it was sometimes fun and fantastical. There was romance, science fiction, mystery, and supernatural elements. Of One Blood, for instance, has been called an afro futurist novel. It's about a midst race medical student who travels to a magically hidden city in northeastern Africa. It's got ghosts, secret treasures, racial passing, murder, revenge,
and incest. Now, it wouldn't be seen as that risk a by modern standards, but I mean on paper, it's sounding like a fantasy drama that any of the major TV.
Networks would compete for.
Pauline left behind a lot of evidence of her ideology and working life, and a lot less about her personal life.
And unfortunately, her.
Story follows the trajectory that a lot of nineteenth and twentieth century Black intellectuals do. Researchers and historians have pieced together the chronology of her life over the last several decades, bringing it back to light after it fell into the shadows of literary history.
This is why I love digging through the archives. There's so much treasure in there, so many hidden stories that we should be documenting, repeating and cherity.
And some of the good folks who did that were folks like doctor Claudia Tate, doctor Mary Helen Washington, and Fisk University, a librarian and scholar, and Alan Shockley. She wrote the nineteen seventy two essay Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, a biographical Excursion into Obscurity. Now there are a ton of essays, articles,
and other scholarship on Pauline's life. Pauline's book Contending Forces was reprinted in nineteen seventy eight as part of the Southern Illinois University Presses Lost American Fiction Series, and in nineteen eighty eight her writing was included in an Oxford University Press in Schoenberg Library series on nineteenth century Black women Writers that was edited by Henry Lewis Gates Junior.
And then there is the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society, which celebrates her life, work and legacy through publications, conferences, and programs that they put together.
And on top of.
All that, her novels of One Blood and Haygard's Daughter were reissued in twenty twenty. Pauline worked on a couple of issues of a new black publication called New Era Magazine in nineteen six, but that magazine went busted pretty quickly, and information about her life and work after that year is available, but it's not as robust as it is for prior years. You'd be excited to know, though Katie as a lover of hating and all things contentious, that there is a potential beef in her story.
Ooh, let's get into it.
I got you after the break.
So, as you know, Katie, black folks had different ideas about what black people needed to do to progress in the US, and Pauline was about denouncing white folks for anti black violence and demanding rights, especially voting rights. Do you remember that pamphlet I quoted a primer of facts. Well, its last sentence is never give up the ballot. So yeah, she wasn't really about being conciliatory and conservative. Her writing in the Colored American magazine was often anti c coommodationist.
It's what we may call today hot takes that could upset the whites because a significant chunk of their readership was white. But as the magazine went through financial struggles and leadership changes, Pauline was asked to tone it down. Pauline said this in a nineteen oh five letter to William Monroe Trotter, the editor of The Boston Guardian. He told me there must not be a word on lynching, no mention of our wrongs as a race, nothing that
would be offensive to the South. The he she was referring to was John Freund, the magazine's white patron, who wanted to silence the progressive civil rights sentiments that Hopkins championed in the magazine.
Sounds familiar. It's a lot like the patron in Zorn neil Herson's story some drama that we talked about in our previous episode, which twenty of y'all want beef. But with this guy, I'm struck because, like magazines are more non fiction based, and so he's literally trying to like take out a big part of history, like no talk on lynching. Yeah, well heart lichings are happening, so you just want that removed from the historical record.
Right.
It's like this magazine is about art, religion, everything that's happening with black people, and that is included, whether or not you like it.
Yeah, and that's a big part of what's going on.
Yeah, and the people are not fooled by this. It also seems like a herculean task. The people who are reading this magazine were already used to the kind of work they were putting out, which means they already wrote a certain way.
And they're aware of what's going on. Yeah, you get trick this right.
They were tinting their fingers like like, hmmm, I have an idea.
Yeah, it's quite silly.
Yes it was.
So it's not exactly a beef because she doesn't call out Booker T. Washington by name or even confront him face to face or letter to letter, but in her work she indirectly and directly challenged his approach to racial progress, which called for self help and vocational education while denouncing agitation. With help from Booker T. Washington, Fred R. Moore purchased the Colored American magazine in nineteen oh four, and the content took a turn toward business.
Rather than literature and culture.
So basically it worked and the magazine became way less politically risky. Within months of Washington taking over, Pauline was forced out under circumstances that scholars have since speculated about. An announcement in the November nineteen oh four issue said that Pauline quit the magazine because of ill health and moved back home to Boston, but the announcement was definitely
giving pr statement. Here's how they ended it. Miss Hopkins was a faithful and conscientious worker and did much toward the building up the magazine. We take this means of expressing our appreciation of her services and wished for her a speedy return to complete health. W. E. B. Du Bois had an essay called The Colored Magazine in America in the November nineteen twelve issue of The Crisis. In it, he said that folks at the magazine told her she
wasn't conciliatory enough. Some scholars say it was a necessary dismissal as the magazine's content changed, But anyway it goes, Pauline definitely didn't put Washington on a pedestal, and she made that known. And I have to say that I'm cackling because, by all accounts, once the magazine got less radical, it also got dry and started tumbling downhill.
Yeah, I can see that if you have this platform where you expouse these values, and just because one person becomes involved and they just want to put all their like conservative values, like make your own magazine. There's other conservative people who probably want to hear what you're saying, but not these people who are used to a different politic. So I feel like conservatives do that a lot. They co opt radical things like we have Black lives matter,
then they want to have blue lives matter. You know, people who are for reproductive justice say like my body, my choice, and then people who are very anti reproductive justice but like don't want to take a COVID vaccine or like my body my chol like maybe get your own phrase. Black people will say say her name, and then white people want to say say her name like no original.
Thought, no, not at all.
It's like, hm, why is that? Why can't they think? But it's like, you have your views, so why don't you just talk about your views in your original way? But I think what it is is like conservatives and not really saying this about Booker T. Washington in particular, but I think conservatives are always like in opposition to your like freedom and autonomy and your liberation. So anything in the opposition of that they're they're down for, like we found your doory six my favorite topic they do.
They don't really like the police, y'all killed the police. Letting the dad killed the police, then it would have been blue lives matter. But you mad about something, so you get the American flag and start stabbing the police with it. So it's like you don't really care, You're just you just don't like black people. You just don't like black people's freedom, you don't like black people being into literature and science and culture, and so you just
want to take it. I feel like that's the through line with like a lot of the conservatives like co opting like radical or like war leftists talking points.
Yeah, it's more about the snatching away of the thing than them having a point to prove on their own. I mean that's how it's always been. It's like we take your family, we take all your cultural touch points, we take your language.
Yeah, and like water it down and then are like confused why it's not hitting the same.
Yeah, Like you should have foresaw this.
Alas, and there are many more pieces to Pauline's puzzle that have yet to be found, but the rediscovery of her legacy is an ongoing labor of love, and there are still plenty of people on the job. And like I said earlier, the thing that I love about Pauline Hopkins is that so much of what she had to say rings true today. Take this other quote from a primer of facts. The propaganda of silence is in full force.
Newspapers and magazines have been subsidized or destroyed. If the editors fearlessly advocated the cause of humanity, every leading intellect has been intimidated. While per contrary, a horde of Southern writers, speakers, and politicians are allowed to fill the air with their doleful clamor against a proscribed race without a protest. Agitation by the black is rigidly barred, but the Southern white is allowed the front of the stage in presenting his
grievances to a sympathetic public. Now that could have been in today exactly.
Yeah, it feels so precient because she's talking about media too, and media has changed a lot from her time, But the same exact thing is still happening. Yes, the same censorship, trusted sources are still disappearing. Then there's just an attack in general on journalism. I mean, speaking of conservatives so frequently say journalism doesn't mean anything today because they don't like it. So I really appreciate that about Pauline's work.
Like we've talked about before, it's unfortunate that we're still going through the same things and talking about the same things.
But I like how much of a balance.
It feels like it is in Pauline's work and her editorial work, and also in her novels and how they were still so fanciful and so imaginative and people were there was time traveling, there were different kinds of worlds, you know, and at the same time she was dealing
with issues of race. And yeah, I think that people should check out some of her novels and her essays and her short stories too if they get a chance, because a lot of the Colored American Magazine is online for you to be able to read her work and just get an understanding of like how she thought.
And they can read Sarah A. Allen's work as well.
They can read Sarah A. Allen's work exactly.
And now it is time for role credits, a segment where we give credit to a person, place, or thing that we encountered during the week eves. Who are what would you like to give credit to?
I would like to give credit to the black chefs. I was having a conversation the other day with this owner of a restaurant and chef who had a bunch of free stuff outside of his restaurant.
Because the business had clothes.
Because it's so difficult for so many people to survive. Now what he had, girl, He had sorrel, He had gallons of sorrel.
He had cakes out there.
He had sweet potatoes, just raw swepotatoes, raw sweet potatoes. Girl, he has some stuff standing outside, and you know, we grabbed some stuff and talked to him for a little bit, but he was talking about downsizing.
Anyway.
I've eaten at that restaurant before, and I just want to give credit to black chefs because whether they have restaurants or they're cooking at home. I mean, there are so many black people that have literally fed me my entire life, and people who were chefs who didn't have restaurants but were still like, had amazing recipes and amazing food. You know, there's just been a part of my life
for forever. And for the people who do have restaurants, I know that it's a difficult business in general, and I'm appreciative of the labor of love and the love that they provide to everything through their hands and their craft. So that's why I want to give credit to Well.
Hopefully he gets his downsize spot and can stay.
Hopefully.
You don't know what he want to do. I want to give credit to Miss Mati prim Jon. She is the owner of Marshall's and Music and bookstore in Jackson, Mississippi. And I was in Jackson over the weekend and I just pulled up on her. I didn't tell her I was coming. I first met her while I was researching my book, and it was like a cute little spot.
People was in there, like buying books and stuff. Like it's on this street that's like it used to be like a bustling downtown in Jackson, but now it's like pretty much abandoned, with like a couple of businesses still open, but they've been in the same spot since nineteen thirty eight.
And yeah, So I pulled up on her, and you know, I told her who I was, and she was like, oh, you know, and we were talking about the book and stuff, and then you know, we was headed out because we about to go back to Atlanta, and she said, well, I'm going to Montgomery later on. And I was like, oh, okay, there's like a book there or something. She was like, I don't know, but I'm celebrating the one year anniversary
of the Montgomery Brawl. No, Katie, No, I was like, oh, She's like, yeah, a group of us are going to commemorate the brawl. I was like, you play all day, but y'all have fun.
They probably have matchave shirts. It was I hope they do.
I hope they have a shirt with like a silhouette of that man with the holding chair. I sure do, and I would purchase one. It's a historical moment.
We're gonna that's our next episode. Actually, stay tuned everyone, and we.
Will see you next week. Bye.
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us on Instagram at on Themeshow. You can also send us an email at hello at on Theme dot show. Head to on Themet Show to check out the show notes for episodes. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.