Pauline Hopkin’s literary activity to Harlem Renaissance

Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self is the last of Hopkins's four novels. She is considered by some^[who?] to be the most prolific African-American woman writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of the 20th century, though she is lesser known than many literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self first appeared in serial form in The Colored American Magazine in the November and December 1902 and the January 1903 issues of the publication, during the four-year period in which Hopkins served as its editor. Elements of the work have been compared to Goethe's Faust.
Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who does not care about being black or appreciating African history but finds himself in Ethiopia on an archaeological trip. His motive is to raid the country of lost treasures, which he does find. However, he discovers much more than he expected: the painful truth about blood, race, and the half of his history that was never told. Hopkins wrote the novel intending, in her own words, to "raise the stigma of degradation from [the Black] race." The title, Of One Blood, refers to the biological kinship of all human beings.
Although Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self is a work of fiction, Hopkins constructs a historical argument in her novel, using historical and literary sources, as well as travelogues.^[8] Her argument, which ran counter to many histories of that time, was that the ancient cultures of the Nile Valley were African in origin, not imported to the area from elsewhere.
In 1988, Oxford University Press released The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers with Professor Henry Louis Gates as the general editor of the series. Hopkins' novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (with an introduction by Richard Yarborough) was reprinted as a part of this series. Her magazine novels (with an introduction by Hazel Carby) were also reprinted as a part of this series. Carby did this as a way to reintroduce Hopkins into the sphere and see how her literature influenced writers in the past, present and now future.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Hopkins’s association with the founders of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company provided her with the opportunity to reach a wider audience. She most prominently achieved this through the Colored American Magazine, which became the widest circulating African American literary publication prior to the rise of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Crisis magazine. From the start, the Colored American Magazine was politically engaged, and as conflicts arose among black intellectuals (often symbolized by, but by no means reducible to, Booker T. Washington’s compromise versus W.E.B. Du Bois’s agitation), the Colored American Magazine was secretly purchased by Washington’s agent Fred Moore. The magazine’s operations were moved away from the radicalism of Boston to New York. Although Hopkins did relocate to New York briefly, Moore’s purchase ended her influence and soon thereafter her career at the magazine. A testament to Hopkins’s popularity was her immediate hiring by the Voice of the Negro, a national monthly which was similar in scope to the Colored American Magazine though it was much more sharply critical of Washington and his associates. Hopkins wrote nonfiction articles for the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro from 1904 to 1905.
Through 1905, Hopkins remained not only active, but visible. She published a pamphlet entitled “A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendents” under her own Cambridge, Massachusetts, imprint. And she addressed the William Lloyd Garrison Centenary in Boston, marking her prominence in the city’s activist-intellectual community. There are fewer known traces of her career during the remaining 25 years of her life. In 1911, she addressed the Charles Sumner Centenary in Boston which is evidence of her ongoing public profile. And, in 1916, she and Walter Wallace, the founding publisher of the Colored American Magazine, began a new venture, the New Era Magazine. The magazine’s only two issues featured a two-part short story by Hopkins as well as two biographical sketches under her byline that closely resemble her nonfiction from the Colored American Magazine. Her invitation to the Sumner event, the subsequent inclusion of her remarks in a pamphlet commemorating the event, and her ongoing association with Wallace suggest that Hopkins remained active in the decades following the end of her career at the Colored American Magazine. While fewer details are known about this period in her career, these gaps in her biography should not be presumed to indicate her inactivity. Rather, these gaps point to the need for additional research.
Another platform for Hopkins’ arguments was the Colored American Magazine, the literary journal she edited. The Colored American Magazine was the widest-circulating African American literary publication before W.E.B. Du Bois founded The Crisis in 1910, the official publication of the NAACP. As editor, Hopkins made sure the Colored American Magazine highlighted the political conversations that arose among Black intellectuals, usually favoring radical stances in line with Du Bois rather than Washington’s compromises . In both the nonfiction and fiction she wrote for the magazine, Hopkins advocated for an activist movement as steadfast as the abolitionist movement to elevate the status of Black Americans, since their relationship with white Americans remained dire in the post-Reconstruction era.
Sherrard-Johnson notes that Hopkins “wanted to share race in a way that was authentic and humanizing, but she also wanted to entertain.” Between 1901 and 1903, Hopkins serialized her three novels after “Contending Forces” in the Colored American Magazine. “Hagar’s Daughter” is one of the first detective stories written by a Black author, but it also explores mixed race identity and the dangers that Black women face. “Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest” is a harrowing tale of two people who are abducted into slavery and then escape, but it also allows the heroine to do some of the rescuing before getting a happily-ever-after romance. “Of One Blood” is part ghost story, part adventurous plot to a long-lost African kingdom, and it once again explores the idea of Black characters who can pass as white. By writing thrilling cliffhangers, Hopkins enticed readers to buy the next issue and successfully ensured reinvestment in the Colored American Magazine.
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.
As Shawl notes in the introduction to “Of One Blood,” and as other scholars have pointed out, the lost civilization in “Of One Blood” is a “proto-Wakanda” a la “Black Panther.” They are two hidden kingdoms in Africa who are proud of their ancestry and have “all the arts and cunning inventions that make your modern glory,” according to the book. Tensions rise when newcomers (who have secretly shared this ancestry all along) ask why the advanced civilization has kept themselves and their prosperity a secret, when they could “raise standards of Black people of diasporic level,” as Sherrard-Johnson will say in a forthcoming paper.
Hopkins’ implicit and explicit criticism of Washington led to a fraught relationship between the two of them. She first declined to work with Washington when he invited her to come to Alabama as a stenographer in 1894. In 1904, Washington sent an associate to purchase the Colored American Magazine, relocate operations to New York and eventually oust Hopkins as editor. “The men she worked with, particularly Booker T. Washington, respected and understood her, but my thought is that they felt threatened by her,” Sherrard-Johnson says.

3. Harlem Renaissance literature