Pauline Hopkin’s literary activity to Harlem Renaissance

encompasses the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction written by Black American writers during the early twentieth century. During the Harlem Renaissance movement, Black writers created work that celebrated Black culture and folklore

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood, many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the movement, which spanned from about 1918 until the mid-1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924—when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a rebirth of the African-American arts. Many people would argue that the Harlem Renaissance never ended and has continued to be an important cultural force in the United States through the decades: from the age of stride piano jazz and blues to the ages of bebop, rock and roll, soul, disco and hip-hop.
During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was the destination for migrants from around the country, attracting both people from the South seeking work and an educated class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class. These people were looking for a fresh start in life and this was a good place to go. The district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper middle classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of stately houses, grand avenues, and world-class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the Harlem Opera House. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late 19th century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle class, who moved farther north.
During this time, writers emerged to discuss themes such as assimilation, alienation, pride, and unity. Below are several of the most prolific writers of this time period—their works are still read in classrooms today.
Events such as the Red Summer of 1919, meetings at the Dark Tower, and everyday lives of African Americans served as inspiration for these writers who often drew from their Southern roots and Northern lives to create lasting stories.
1. Langston Hughes is one of the most prominent writers of the Harlem Renaissance. In a career that began in the early 1920s and lasted through his death in 1967, Hughes wrote plays, essays, novels, and poems. His most notable works include "Montage of a Dream Deferred," "The Weary Blues," "Not Without Laughter," and "Mule Bone."
2. Zora Neale Hurston's work as an anthropologist, folklorist, essayist, and novelist made her one of the key players of the Harlem Renaissance period.​In her lifetime, Hurston published more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays as well as four novels and an autobiography. While poet Sterling Brown once said, "When Zora was there, she was the party," Richard Wright found her use of dialect appalling.Hurston's notable works include "Their Eyes Were Watching God," "Mule Bone," and "Dust Tracks on the Road." Hurston was able to complete most of these works because of the financial help provided by Charlotte Osgood Mason, who helped Hurston to travel throughout the south for four years and collect folklore.
3. Jessie Redmon Fauset is often remembered for being one of the architects of the Harlem Renaissance movement for her work with W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. However, Fauset was also a poet and novelist whose work was widely read during and after the Renaissance period.Her novels include "Plum Bun," "Chinaberry Tree," and "Comedy: An American Novel."Historian David Levering Lewis notes that Fauset's work as a key player of the Harlem Renaissance was "probably unequaled" and he argues that "there is no telling what she would have done had she been a man, given her first-rate mind and formidable efficiency at any task."
4. Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. wrote plays, essays, and poetry. In the last seven years of Cotter's life, he wrote several poems and plays. His play "On the Fields of France" was published in 1920, a year after Cotter's death. Set on a battlefield in Northern France, the play follows the last few hours of the lives of two army officers—one Black and the other white—who die holding hands. Cotter also wrote two other plays, "The White Folks’ Nigger" as well as "Caroling Dusk."Cotter was born in Louisville, Kentucky, as the son of Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr., who was also a writer and educator. Cotter died of tuberculosis in 1919.
5. James Weldon Johnson once said, "Claude McKay's poetry was one of the great forces in bringing about what is often called the 'Negro Literary Renaissance.” Considered one of the most prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay used themes such as African American pride, alienation, and desire for assimilation in his works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
McKay's most famous poems include "If We Must Die," "America," and "Harlem Shadows."He also wrote several novels including "Home to Harlem," "Banjo," "Gingertown," and "Banana Bottom."
Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War. Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York.
Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American communities, even in the North. After the end of World War I, many African-American soldiers—who fought in segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters—came home to a nation whose citizens often did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred throughout the US during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.
In the mid-1980s, scholars began to rediscover Hopkins. In 1988, Oxford University Press reprinted all of her novels and most of her short stories in its Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers series, which was edited by Henry Louis Gates. She is best remembered as a pioneer in using the traditional literary form of the romantic novel to explore and challenge racial and gender representations of middle-class Blacks in the early part of the twentieth century.
In addition, during her tenure at the Colored American Magazine -- one of the first major literary magazines targeted at a largely African American audience --, she is credited with laying the groundwork for the evolving African American literary style that would later become associated with the literati of the Harlem Renaissance. She has been characterized as "One of the most prolific African American woman writers and the most influential literary editors of the first decade of the twentieth century".
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an anthology edited by Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favour and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few, until well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
After Colored American Magazine, Hopkins wrote for several more prominent magazines and published one last novella, but little is known about her work after 1916. Sherrard-Johnson posits, “Colored American [Magazine] provided an audience and a motivation for her work. When one is discouraged, it’s hard to keep writing.” Hopkins continued to support herself through steady stenography work for the City of Cambridge, the Massachusetts State House and a college in Cambridge which the introduction of the 2020 edition of “Hagar’s Daughter” says many presume to be MIT. Her life ended tragically from burns sustained after an oil stove explosion in August of 1930.
Although Hopkins legacy was in danger of being lost to time due to her status as a Black woman who “was not following safe conventions of storytelling as far as the literary establishment goes,” as Shawl says, American society has finally started to recognize the vital perspectives of marginalized figures. Sherrard-Johnson adds, “For a long time, we had an established idea of major American writers — they were white and male, with some notable exceptions in New England, some Dickenson, some Alcott, and Harriet Jacobs’ ‘Life of a Slave Girl.’” But now that archival literature is being studied with a wider scope, these works are becoming more accessible to the general public. As Shawl says, “It’s gratifying to those of us who are on the margins racially, how this maybe influenced others in my community, saying, ‘Hey, we were always there! ”’
The renaissance had many sources in Black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean, and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give the “New Negroes” visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere. Located just north of Central Park, Harlem was a formerly white residential district that by the early 1920s was becoming virtually a Black city within the borough of Manhattan. Other boroughs of New York City were also home to people now identified with the renaissance, but they often crossed paths in Harlem or went to special events at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities (where they had their own intellectual circles, theatres, and reading groups) also met in Harlem or settled there. New York City had an extraordinarily diverse and decentred Black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority. As a result, it was a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation.
While the renaissance built on earlier traditions of African American culture, it was profoundly affected by trends—such as primitivism—in European and white American artistic circles. Modernist primitivism was inspired partly by Freudian psychology, but it tended to extol “primitive” peoples as enjoying a more direct relationship to the natural world and to elemental human desires than “overcivilized” whites. The keys to artistic revolution and authentic expression, some intellectuals felt, would be found in the cultures of “primitive races,” and preeminent among these, in the stereotypical thinking of the day, were the cultures of sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants. Early in the 20th century, European avant-garde artists had drawn inspiration from African masks as they broke from realistic representational styles toward abstraction in painting and sculpture. The prestige of such experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on their African heritage with new eyes and in many cases with a desire to reconnect with a heritage long despised or misunderstood by both whites and Blacks.
4. Pauline Hopkins was a multitalented author, journalist and editor who pioneered horror, science fiction and fantasy writing at the turn of the 20th century. She wrote among the first (if not the first) theatrical drama and detective stories authored by a Black person, yet, her fiction does not have the same recognition as household names like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” nor does her nonfiction have the same acclaim as W.E.B. Du Bois’.
Hopkins published her short story “The Mystery Within Us” in the first issue of the Colored American Magazine. In the June issue it was announced that she would be in charge of the women’s column. The September issue featured a long advertisement for her novel Contending Forces, which was forthcoming from the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company. In the next issue her short story “Talma Gordon” appeared. From then onward there was often more than one contribution by Hopkins in each issue of the magazine: usually one biographical sketch and often a short story or one chapter of her.Hopkins’s journalistic essays at the Colored American Magazine shed light on her biography, although the references are often indirect. Her “Famous Men of the Negro Race” series, running from November 1900 to October 1901, is the best starting point for a discussion of her negotiations with one of the most influential race leaders, Booker T. Washington, and of her position as a radical African American in the Boston of her time. Similar to most women who aspired to obtain positions of prominence, Hopkins faced a power structure working against her.The black woman’s era was the age of a generation of famous race women. Between 1880 and 1920 African American intellectuals, educators, public lecturers, and artists of all branches found recognition in the club movement. Hundreds of African American women were eager to uplift the race through motivations to self-help and race pride. The rise to prominence of several leading personalities is documented in Hopkins’s essays, which provide the public awareness these women needed and deserved. It was not a homogeneous movement that united all the women involved in it; discord often predominated over agreement. Hopkins was aware of the.Hopkins 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 Bois and thus agreed more with her own preferences. In late 1904 and early 1905 Hopkins published an essay, “The New York Subway,” and...
Pauline Hopkins opens the preface to her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, by saying: “In giving this little romance expression in print, I am not actuated by a desire for notoriety or for profit, but to do all that I can in an humble way to raise the stigma of degradation from my race” . Her tone of female modesty was felt to be appropriate by many women writers of her time and concealed her outspoken and articulate voice. In calling her story a “romance,” she grounds herself firmly in a tradition
The engraving of the whipping scene at the beginning of Contending Forces (1900) offers an excellent opening for a discussion of Pauline Hopkins’s fiction. In addition to the contrast between the female victim and the two male torturers, there is a subtle play of colors in this black-and-white engraving. The whiteness of the woman on the floor stands out in contrast to the dark attire of the man looking down upon her, while the white shirt and trousers of the man occupied with the whip are repeated by the white color of the whipping post and the trunks of the.Pauline Hopkins opens the preface to her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, by saying: In giving this little romance expression in print, I am not actuated by a desire for notoriety or for profit, but to do all that I can in an humble way to raise the stigma of degradation from my race . Her tone of female modesty was felt to be appropriate by many women writers of her time and concealed her outspoken and articulate voice. In calling her story a “romance,” she grounds herself firmly in a tradition. Traditional works also became popular of those periods .The engraving of the whipping scene at the beginning of Contending Forces (1900) offers an excellent opening for a discussion of Pauline Hopkins’s fiction. In addition to the contrast between the female victim and the two male torturers, there is a subtle play of colors in this black-and-white engraving. The whiteness of the woman on the floor stands out in contrast to the dark attire of the man looking down upon her, while the white shirt and trousers of the man occupied with the whip are repeated by the white color of the whipping post and the trunks of the. When you read those articles you can see and find useful informations and sources that might be beneficial on your studies. In the March 1903 issue of the Colored American Magazine, when Cornelia Condict criticized Pauline Hopkins for writing about interracial love rather than intraracial love, her reproach was basically aimed at the figure of the mulatta, the beautiful light-colored woman who may pass for white and who occasionally marries a white man without letting him know of her ancestry. In a country where interracial marriage was legally forbidden—in the case of Alabama even up to the election of the year 2000—the position of the mulatto was and continues to be of special and conspicuous significance.
This is partly due to the unfortunate reality that archival materials related to marginalized figures, especially Black women like Hopkins, are difficult to exhume when they are no longer active. The other part is the long-standing racist and sexist ideas behind what constitutes “literary canon.” To elevate awareness of Hopkins in the 21st century, two of her four novels have recently been reissued: “Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self” was reissued on Feb. 9 and “Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice” in December 2020.
Hopkins wasn’t shy about her politics in her writing, either. Unlike the conservative Booker T. Washington, she favored agitation methods to address racial inequality, spoke against imperialism and centered Black women at the heart of the issues. Dr. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin and president of The Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society, says, “Hopkins was very forthright in her activism against lynching and sexual violence against Black women. These subjects were not talked about, especially sexual abuse, and Hopkins talked about them as openly as she could in her novels.”
Hopkins’ use of romantic and adventurous plots to explore philosophical questions about race and society was an innovative approach not employed by her peers. Shawl notes that Hopkins blended Afrocentric traditions (such as the art of the coincidence, fate and the unseen) with Eurocentric storytelling forms of “society” novels (aka “drawing room dramas”), “lost world adventures” and the more modern idea of a “problem” novel. “One of the strengths of Afro-Diasporic culture is that we have to make do with what we’ve got,” Shawl says. “We’re not going to conform to anyone’s rules on how to use what we’ve got, we’re just going to use it.”
Sherrard-Johnson has taught “Of One Blood” alongside Henry James’ “The Turn of The Screw” because of their similar gothic feel and psychological elements. “The occult and mesmerism were prevalent in popular culture, they were seen as a form of science at the time,” says Sherrard-Johnson. She points out that the motif of a formerly enslaved ghost in “Of One Blood” would later famously appear in “Beloved” by Toni Morrison.
After Colored American Magazine, Hopkins wrote for several more prominent magazines and published one last novella, but little is known about her work after 1916. Sherrard-Johnson posits, “Colored American [Magazine] provided an audience and a motivation for her work. When one is discouraged, it’s hard to keep writing.” Hopkins continued to support herself through steady stenography work for the City of Cambridge, the Massachusetts State House and a college in Cambridge which the introduction of the 2020 edition of “Hagar’s Daughter” says many presume to be MIT. Her life ended tragically from burns sustained after an oil stove explosion in August of 1930.
Pauline Hopkins' short story, Talma Gordon was published in 1900 and is credited as the first published mystery by a black author.
Just this fact alone made this a story I wanted to read. I have always been a fan of mysteries and my recent discovery of the many mysteries by black authors has opened a new world for me. It is fascinating to investigate how mystery and crime fiction by black authors has changed over the years. I also think it is important that we remember and honor the black authors who came before us and made a way for our current writers.
Talma Gordon is a different type of mystery. The story is not centered around a detective or person as they seek to find the murderer. This story is told in the fashion of a retelling of events that surround the death of Capt. Jonathan Gordon, his wife, and their little son. The story is told by the respected Doctor Thornton.
The story is set in a time when a woman's destiny was determined by the man she married. It was a time when a woman had to depend on a man to control all her financial matters even if the money was originally hers. Plus, you have the lack of civil rights for all people of color and especially black people. This comes to play a key role in this fast-moving short story.
As the story develops, we see how the cloud of suspicion that surrounds Talma due to her parent's death has an oppressive effect on her life and so many others. The ending will catch you off guard.
Overall, I enjoyed reading this short story. The picture painted of the time period was great and it was done without slowing down the pace of the story with excessive descriptions of the setting. The language is beautiful and is fitting with the time period. I would encourage everyone to read this short story for its historical importance. Also, it is an enjoyable quick read. Pauline Hopkins was a very prolific writer of the time and has many other stories beside Talma Gordon. Check out her work.
You may also want to check out the great resources on The Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society.
In "Talma Gordon,"