In the 1905 letter to William Monroe Trotter, Pauline Hopkins wrote
that she lost the editorship of the Colored American Magazine
because she "refused partisan lines" and "pursued an
independent course." This book focuses on how her editorship
promoted an advocacy journalism that sought to abolish Jim Crow. The
work of the magazine under her editorship "pursued an
independent course" because it included in-depth biographical
sketches of those whose lives she, before many, deemed important to
know, such as Toussaint L'Ouverture and Harriet Tubman. Hopkins
"pursued an independent course" also as a novelist,
particularly in her first novel Contending Forces, a work unique for
a narrator that tried to, in Hopkins's words, "raise the stigma
of degradation from my race." Her following three novels were
serialized in the Colored American Magazine. Her 1901 novel
Hagar's Daughter is about the attempt of two generations to
assimilate within the Washingtonian elite, her 1902 novel Winona
exposes the effect of Washington's 1850 Fugitive Slave Law on
enslaved children, and her 1903 novel Of One Blood explores
what it means for an individual socialized in the West to, in
Hopkins's words, "curse the bond of the white race." In Dr.
Rhone Fraser's, close reading of her fiction, he looks at how her
protagonists in each novel pursue "an independent course"
and in his final chapter he compares her essential work to Black
journalists of the twenty first century who, like her, "refused
partisan lines" and "pursued an independent course."
Pauline Hopkins's work was not just the work of a typical journalist,
but the work of an advocate.
