This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month 2019.
“All things work together for good” is the moral at the end of one of Pauline Hopkins’ stories about the Black women’s club movement as a site of drama, learning and transformation.
Pauline Hopkins’ name has been spoken for a century and a half and should be sung forever (and not only because of the beauty and elegance of her actual name!) Hopkins is best known for the novels that she published in her 40s, but she was active in the literary movement from a young age and staged her first play when she was 20 years old. Pauline Hopkins is an example of what Sangodare and I call a “by every means approach.”
As a Black woman born in the 1850s in Portland, Maine when slavery was still legal in the United States and the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect, Hopkins had to create the spaces for expression that her creative work required. She also took a leadership role in some of the very first Black publications in the United States. She served as a shareholder and board member of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company and editor of The Colored American Magazine which raised important debates about the trajectory of Black freedom. Her voice had such an impact within Black intellectual spheres that Booker T. Washington found it dangerous. He bought the publishing company in a hostile takeover and installed an editor who was more amenable to his own views. Hopkins was immediately hired by another national monthly magazine based in Atlanta called Voice of the Negro. Eventually Hopkins collaborated with the founding editor of The Colored American Magazine to found New Era Magazine in 1916.
Although everything I have just mentioned happened at least a century ago, without digital technology, Pauline Hopkins created a mobile approach with local investments through her participation in the Club Women’s Movement, a network through which Black women created national and international networks of information and funding through local events that often took place in homes. Hopkins also worked with her family of origin to create creative spaces of Black engagement and imagination through Hopkins Colored Troubadours which traveled and performed musical theater, including her play The Slave’s Escape or the Underground Railroad. Three of Hopkins novels were published serially in the magazines that she was involved in which helped her build an audience for her work in the communities she was most engaged in cultivating. Her best known novel Contending Forces could also be a poetic way to describe her career. Despite the deadly constraints on the mobility of Black people during her lifetime, the outright attacks of powerful “race men” within the Black community on her work as a Black woman writer and the strictures of sexism, Pauline Hopkins drew on multiple institutions and multiple modes to maintain the integrity of her expression. Her approach required “all things” music, fiction, non-fiction, publishing, the co-founding of the Boston Historical Society and more.
For those of us navigating repressive times, people within our own movements with big egos, the reality of being pushed out of institutions we helped create and good old racism and sexism in their 21st century manifestations, Pauline Hopkins’ example has much to teach us. She was a person who in the words of her story “Oceana” was “born with a vision so keen as to pierce the veil swinging between the present and the future.”
How could an embrace of “all things” impact your approach to institutional affiliations and the life of your work? Hopkins’ emphasis that “all things work together for good” revealed a faith in her community of support that could withstand drama within the interpersonal relationships that sustained the club movement, drastic institutional changes and hostile takeovers and even social norms that limited what Black women’s role could be in activist, intellectual and creative spaces.
Can you make a drawing, chart or list of multiple outlets and groups you have access to that could support your work in the communities you are most accountable to? How can your investment in those spaces nourish your own creative options?
As a blessing for the way things are coming together to support your vision we offer this meditation inspired by Pauline Hopkins. Your purpose is bigger than any organization or conflict. It lives on.
And of course, this is what we cultivate all the time at Brilliance Remastered if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.
And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.
Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)
Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs