Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was born in Portland, Maine, in 1859. She grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and her family included influential African American ministers, leaders, abolitionists, and civil rights activists. Hopkins developed an interest in literature while attending Boston public schools. In 1874, she won an essay contest was organized by abolitionist and dramatist William Wells Brown. As a young woman, Hopkins pursued a career as a theatrical performer and singer. By the 1890s, she decided to shift her focus to writing. Hopkins wrote plays and several short stories before publishing her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South in 1900. The work demonstrates Hopkins’s experimentation with the romantic novel to explore the issue of racism and the legacy of enslavement. Hopkins’s next two novels, Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice and Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, were published serially in the Colored American Magazine, a literary journal dedicated to African American culture founded in 1900. Of One Blood, Hopkins’s final novel, was also serialized in the Colored American Magazine between 1902 and 1903.

Throughout her career, Hopkins emphasized the perspective of the African American community, pride in African heritage, and the uplift of Black people. In addition to her creative writing, Hopkins worked as an editor of the Colored American Magazine. Hopkins made significant contributions to the magazine through her editorial work, as well as through fiction and non-fiction pieces that focused on African American history, racial discrimination, class struggle, economic justice, and women’s issues. In 1904, the Colored American Magazine changed ownership and relocated to New York. Hopkins followed, but soon left as the magazine shifted its politics away from radicalism. Few details are known about her career after 1905, when she self-published a pamphlet called, “A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants.” In the same year, she gave a speech at the William Lloyd Garrison Centenary in Boston. Hopkins died in 1930 after injuries sustained in a fire.

Hopkins remained in obscurity during the years of the Harlem Renaissance. Her writing was rediscovered in the 1970s by librarian and scholar Ann Shockley. Since then, Hopkins’s work has been studied by scholars of Pan-Africanism, African American literature, feminist theory, and anti-colonialism.