Pauline Hopkins and Advocacy Journalism

By Rhone Fraser

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796014297

Rhone Fraser

RHONE FRASER is an independent scholar and a lifetime member of the Pauline Hopkins Society. He earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University in 2012 and taught on the faculty of Temple, Princeton, and Howard Universities. His website is www.drrhonefraser.com.

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Copyright © 2019 by Rhone Fraser.

Cover Photo:  From the January-February 1902 issue of the Colored American Magazine, reproduced from The Digital Colored American Magazine, ColoredAmerican.org. Original held at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

ISBN:              Softcover             978-1-7960-1430-3

                         eBook                 978-1-7960-1429-7

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Rev. date: 02/22/2019

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1   My Race Work And Principles: The Editorial Ideology Of Pauline Hopkins

Chapter 2   Nature’s Vengeance Against Liberalism: Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces

Chapter 3   Boyhood Lessons From Industry Journalism in Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter

Chapter 4   ‘Experience’ As Radical Teacher in Hopkins’s Winona

Chapter 5   ‘Cursing the bond of the white race’ in Hopkins’s Of One Blood

Chapter 6   International Uplift: Hopkins’s Lessons For Journalism in the Twenty First Century

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

I would like to first thank my savior, Jesus Christ, for finishing my first book and the foundation of faith in Him that my parents laid. From my mother I learned the spiritual and from my father I learned the technical. I am grateful for both and their consistent support of my professional endeavors. I thank my grandmother Maudlin Young for her consistent emotional support. I thank my sisters Marilyn and Denia for their consistent verbal and emotional support of my work. I thank my grandfather Joslyn for his spiritual and emotional support. I thank my therapist Dr. Ayo Gooden for her consistent encouragement and support. I thank Dr. Heather Ann Thompson who made clear that the single chapter I wrote in my dissertation could become a book. Step one, Dr. Thompson. Thank you. I thank Lois Brown for writing a biography that changed my life. I thank Lena Ampadu for a life-changing conversation on Temple’s campus about Frances Harper, a mentor of Pauline Hopkins. I thank the late Beth Howse of Fisk University Special Collections for being the first librarian to allow me to touch the closest version of the letter Pauline Hopkins wrote. I thank April Logan for her leadership and the emotional support provided during this writing process. I thank Alisha Knight and Hanna Wallinger for their scholarship on Hopkins. I thank Trudier Harris, Lavinia Jennings, and Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie for their literary criticism that inspires me. I thank Nathaniel Norment Jr. for inspiring me by writing about Addison Gayle Jr. I thank Osizwe Eyi di yiye for helping me earn my first book contract. I thank Reverend Graylan Hagler, Minister Crystal Lewis, Reverend Julianne Robertson, Cheryl LaBash, Catherine Murphy, Mimi Machado, Barrington Salmon, Jason Latty, Medea Benjamin, Carmen Francis, Rochelle Seeney, Pam Smart, and Solangel Childs for my making my current residence more of a home. Thanks to Dadland Maye and Durrock Knox for their help with my website. Thanks to Andrew Mayton for phenomenally helpful copyedits. Thanks to Natalie King-Pedroso for responding in kind after meeting in San Francisco, and choosing to host my very first book reading and signing in Tallahassee. Thanks to Xlibris for publishing the plays of J.e. Franklin and, finally, thanks to Sandi, Abdul-Aliy, and Allison for their direct support that helped me finish my first book.

Introduction

Neo-McCarthyism is real. There is an attempt by the mainstream media and mainstream social media in the twenty first century to censor ideas that do not assume the necessity of the two party Democratic-Republican system in the United States. The twenty first century incarnation of the McCarthyism where mainstream news companies use the label of Communist, terrorist or most recently, anti-Semitic essentially function to censor ideas from writers whose work does not assume working within the mainstream two party political system in the United States. CNN fired its commentator Marc Lamont Hill for his November 28, 2018 speech at the United Nations calling attention to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Three weeks after CNN’s firing of Hill, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, according to BuzzFeed.com, is under fire for listing the title of a book, in a New York Times interview, by an author who the mainstream labeled an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.¹

The label of anti-Semitic in the twenty first century is being used to ridicule, defame and ultimately censor Black writers such as Marc Lamont Hill and Alice Walker in ways that the label of Communist was used to censor writers in the twentieth century. The Neo-McCarthyism highlights the private nature of private property that Thomas Jefferson outlined in the Declaration of Independence. This private nature of property enables those who owned the most wealth at the nation’s inception to use news media in way that will maintain or enrich their capital or their wealth. Writer Graham Ellwood reported that YouTube demonetizes videos that mention keywords like Yemen, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague write that Facebook in October deleted the accounts of hundreds of users that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism. Karl Marx describes the private nature of property ownership in the West and it is this kind of ownership that enables the mainstream to create narratives about specific writers to justify their being censored. The nonfiction and fiction of Pauline Hopkins provides key theories and lessons as to how to survive Neo-McCarthyism of the twenty first century. It is obvious that she read Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson and their principles about the private ownership in her nonfiction writings that mention the theories of both men.

In her 1905 pamphlet entitled A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by its Descendants—with Epilogue, Hopkins wrote that when labor and capital become contending forces, the Black will float into the full enjoyment of citizenship. Blood will flow, for humanity sweeps onward, and God’s purposes never fail.² Hopkins’s first novel that she published through a group she co-founded is entitled Contending Forces. Hopkins’s fiction deals with the contending forces of labor and capital, but also with liberalism and radicalism as the first chapter will explore. Hopkins’s nonfiction provides lessons intended to teach her reader how to, among these forces, float into the full enjoyment of citizenship.

Hopkins’s work has been given passing mention by Hubert Harrison and Addison Gayle Jr. The meaning of her fiction was especially underestimated by Gwendolyn Brooks who said that Hopkins’s fiction proves herself still to be a slave.³ Brooks argues this, citing her mixed race heroines and events in her fiction where African blood is becoming diluted with amalgamation with the higher race. This book shows that Hopkins’s fiction proves that Hopkins is evolved far beyond a slave. In fact, her fiction provides a blueprint for surviving the Neo-McCarthyism of the twenty first century. This book takes a deeper look at Hopkins’s four novels and how each novel promotes ideas and theories she outlined in her 1905 letter to fellow journalist William Monroe Trotter. In this letter, she laments the loss of her editorship of the Colored American Magazine. She writes that she lost the editorship of the Colored American Magazine periodical because she pursued an independent course and refused to adopt partisan lines.

This book looks at each of Hopkins’s four novels and how they include select characters who follow the theory that Hopkins outlines in this 1905 letter to fellow journalist William Monroe Trotter. This book explains how each character, like Hopkins herself, within each pursued an independent course and refused to adopt partisan lines. The first chapter of this book, ‘My Race Work And Principles’: The Editorial Ideology of Pauline Hopkins describes Pauline Hopkins’s editorial ideology as literary editor of the Colored American Magazine periodical. It does this providing historical background and context into her actual 1905 letter, to which Hopkins attaches twenty additional letters of correspondence between herself, periodical co-owner William DuPree and a benefactor named John Freund. This chapter also provides the theoretical definition of the kind of journalism Hopkins’s nonfiction and fiction promoted: advocacy journalism. It contrasts the journalism promoted by benefactor John Freund, which is industry journalism. This chapter contrasts Hopkins and Freund’s differing ideologies of journalism and compares that contrast to twentieth and twenty first century

The second chapter Nature’s Vengeance Against Liberalism: Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces looks at the novel through the two contending forces of liberalism and radicalism, embodied by her characters Charles Montfort and Will Smith, respectively. This chapter shows the consequences of choosing one force over another, and focuses also on how the relationship between her characters John Langley and Herbert Clapp reflect the limitations of the two party system.

The third chapter, Boyhood Lessons From Industry Journalism in Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter looks at the behavior of a pair of men who seek to profit from chattel slavery that use the U.S. Civil War to disguise their identity as postbellum imperialists seeking profit from wage slavery. This chapter looks at the women in this novel, Hagar Sargeant and Jewel Bowen, who aspire to be part of the social class these men are part of, and discusses the effects of being socialized by the industry journalism of this time, in the late nineteenth century.

The fourth chapter, Experience As Radical Teacher in Hopkins’s Winona, describes the journey of one protagonist, Warren Maxwell, from being a liberal to being a radical. This novel is set in the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Its omniscient narrator explains characters loyal to the advocacy journalism perspective of an abolitionist, and characters loyal to the industry journalism perspective of slavedriver. It is centered in the abolitionist battle of John Brown who is a central character in the novel. The novel shows how fighting this abolitionist battle is required for one’s survival and growth.

The fifth chapter Cursing the bond of the white race in Hopkins’s Of One Blood describe the characteristics of the medical school student-protagonist Reuel Briggs that enable him to curse the bond of the white race. He is able to do this because he acknowledges the importance of his dream life and despite what conventional beliefs in the medical field tells him, he seeks to apply the lessons of this dream life to his own life. Because of Reuel’s dream life, he is able to do four things: one, demonstrate a self-sacrificial faithfulness to those who suffered; two, demonstrate a willingness to identify the African identity stigmatized by African culture; three, demonstrate a willingness to learn from this precolonial classical African civilization; and four, commit to curse the bond of the white race.

The sixth chapter, International Uplift: Hopkins’s Lessons For Journalism in the Twenty First Century explains the meaning of Hopkins’s editorial ideology for the twenty first century. It does this by comparing the difference between the periodical Colored American Magazine and literary periodicals of the twenty first century. It includes interviews with those I identify as advocacy journalists of the twenty first century, which include Angela Dodson, Cynthia McKinney, and Glen Ford.

Each protagonist discussed in this book is one who is unique and worth serious study and reflection because they each, like Hopkins, adopted an independent course and refused partisan lines. In this environment where users of Google, YouTube, and especially Facebook are being directed away from left wing websites, it is imperative that we study the nonfiction and fiction of Pauline Hopkins as a way to create and maintain an artistic standard for writing and critiquing fiction and nonfiction.

Chapter One

My Race Work And Principles: The Editorial Ideology Of Pauline Hopkins

In her 1905 letter to William Monroe Trotter, Pauline Hopkins wrote that she lost editorial control of the monthly periodical she co-founded, the Colored American Magazine, because she pursued an independent course. By independent she meant a course that did not endorse the agenda of the mainstream U.S. Republican or Democratic parties. This letter is a manifesto for Black journalists in the 20th and 21st century that proves that pursuing a political course independent of the two party mainstream is in fact profitable. She writes that a functionary of Booker T. Washington, John Freund, first arrived in her Boston office with money to support her periodical intended for a Black audience in Boston. However within one year, he managed to divide the founding leadership of this periodical and replace her as editor. He replaced her because she refused to follow his policy of no talk of a proscribed race; no talk of the international aspect of the Negro question.⁴ However, she writes William Monroe Trotter asking whether, after Freund replaced her, the periodical became more profitable. The answer is a resounding no. This letter documents how industrial capitalism determined the reading content at the beginning of twentieth century for an educated Black public. Hopkins’s experience with John Freund, Booker T. Washington and his millionaire funders show that content that lacks in-depth political analysis and political education do not reach a wide reading audience, not because they are not popular, but because they are not made to be popular. The kind of in-depth analysis into the international aspect of the Negro question that Pauline Hopkins pursued was the kind of content that her reading public was hungry for. However the wealthy interests in the four years she edited the Colored American Magazine sought to silence her voice. Pauline Hopkins played a key role in shaping the public opinion of this international aspect of the Negro question that obviously threatened the economic interest of her funders who in 1900 were pursuing the Philippines in a military occupation that utilized Black soldiers.

Pauline Hopkins was very clear that she intended to use her platform as a journalist to be an advocate for the Black community. In their history of the Black press called The Race Beat, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff describe journalist Daisy Bates and her husband L.C. Bates as part of the advocacy tradition of the Negro press. Pauline Hopkins belongs to this tradition. In my 2012 Temple University dissertation, I describe literature of the Black press in terms of two schools: an expository school and an advocacy school. The advocacy school is devoted primarily to either the abolition of slavery in the 19th century as the periodical Freedom’s Journal was, or to the abolition of Jim Crow discrimination in the 20th century. Hopkins was devoted to the latter. She is an advocacy journalist because she was not devoted to a regular paycheck that the journalism industry of the twentieth, and the twenty first century, provides. She was first and foremost, like Ida B. Wells, and Marcus Garvey, interested in engaging the international aspect of the Negro question, casting her net wide to reach as broad a Black reading public as possible. She is not a public intellectual in the mold of a Michael Eric Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, or an Angela Davis. She was interested in uplift through her editorial ideology that encouraged a higher level of race consciousness. She co-founded her own periodical in Boston, along with four Virginians, Walter Wallace, Jesse Watkins, Walter Johnson, and Harper Fortune, not for the purpose of building wealth, but to build the race consciousness of her readership. Ishmael Reed writes that before integration, Black newspapers like Hopkins’s Colored American Magazine and Garvey’s Negro World were so powerful and independent that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to charge them with sedition. Black journalism was weakened, however, when some of the more talented Black journalists got jobs with mainstream industry newspapers where they have no power.⁵ Those who have jobs with mainstream industry newspapers are known as industry journalists, who toe the industry line and who fundamentally endorse the course that the funders of Booker T. Washington, such as Andrew Carnegie, are endorsing. A recent influential Black industry journalist who towed the industry line in her reporting and questioning is Gwen Ifill. In her 2011 interview with the American Archive of Television, she describes her entry into television news journalism with Jim Lehrer as one where she could not report a story that Lehrer would not approve. She said that he was pretty rigid about what he wanted the news to be.⁶ This meant that Ifill’s role as an industry journalist required that she report what the industry wanted her report, and not what she thought that exclusively Black communities within the District of Columbia or across the nation needed to know. This makes her markedly different from the work of an advocacy journalist like Pauline Hopkins who determined what she would write and what she would report. The mainstream television and industries rely on industry journalists to relay news to their audiences and this is markedly different from the way that Hopkins engaged the international aspect of the Negro question in her own periodical. Journalist Jill Nelson described the struggle of Black journalists working as industry journalists when she wrote that

At the Washington Post and elsewhere, objectivity is defined by the owners. Since those who run the post are white men, objectivity, far from being ‘independent of individual thought,’ is dependent upon their experience—sensible or not. For most African American journalists, working in mainstream media entails a daily struggle with this notion of objectivity. Each day we are required to justify ourselves, our community, and our story ideas. The more successful of us refashion ourselves in the image of white men. We go to Ivy League colleges and socialize primarily with white folks. If we are women, we straighten our hair or buy extensions—yards of synthetic or dead hair we have sewn on in order to have flowing locks…In short, we make ourselves as nonthreatening—as much like white folks—as possible.⁷

Because Hopkins was an advocacy journalist who wrote exclusively for the Black community, she did not have to struggle with this notion of objectivity that Jill Nelson and Gwen Ifill had to struggle with. Nor did she have to, as Jill Nelson describes, justify her story ideas. Before Freund’s influence, Hopkins wrote and engaged the international aspect of the Negro question rigorously when she wrote her first biographical profile on the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture and the lessons for leadership that her Black Boston readers could learn from in order to support revolutionary causes in their own communities. She did not have to refashion her editorial ideology while writing this biographical profile. However within four years of her editorship, she told William Monroe Trotter that she lost it due to pursuing an independent course as an advocacy journalist who wrote the fiction and nonfiction that she wanted to write.

Since Hopkins’s editorship ended by 1904, two modes of thought have governed U.S. industry journalism in ways that silence rigorous discussion of what Hopkins described the international aspect of the Negro question. These two modes of thought are Zionism and Nazism. Zionism is a belief in the political and military supremacy of the colonial settler state of Israel. Bruce David Baum defines Nazism as the belief in the Aryan or Nordic master race based on racial purity of a German homogenous society.⁸ The Zionist movement grew by the next decade after the conclusion of Hopkins’ editorship. Nazism in mainstream news and radio emerged in the United States in 1933 after the Haavara transfer agreement, drafted by Zionists. This agreement allowed Jewish citizens of Germany