PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS

Saxakali
Publications

Runoko Rashidi
email: rrashidi@swbell.net

THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY
HISTORY NOTES:
PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS
DEAN OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

DEDICATED TO

HARRIET TUBMAN
(1820 - 3/10/1913)

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Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930), called the "Dean of African-American women writers," was born in Portland, Maine. She moved to Boston as an infant and was educated in the Boston public schools. In time, Hopkins became a journalist, essayist, novelist, poet, publisher, public lecturer, actress, musician, and stenographer for the Bureau of Statistics on the Massachusetts Census of 1895 for four years.

From the age of fifteen, after winning a literary contest sponsored by the African-American playwright, novelist, essayist, historian, and abolitionist, William Wells Brown (1814-1884), Hopkins wrote prolifically. At the age of twenty she completed her first play--Slaves' Escape; or The Underground Railroad, and soon became a founder and literary editor of the Colored American Magazine, "the first significant Afro-American journal to emerge in the twentieth century."

During this period, she began to lecture on Black history in churches and schools.

As an historian, the pinnacle of her writing career came in 1905. From February to July 1905 Hopkins wrote one of the earliest discourses on the Global African Community in the form of a four-part series on "The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century," published in The Voice of the Negro. In the same year Hopkins authored and published a thirty-one page booklet entitled "A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by its Descendants--With Epilogue."

Beginning in 1904, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins began to suffer from poor health. She died in obscurity on August 13, 1930 after a full lifetime of "placing the interests of her people above all else." This brief essay is designed to help rescue Ms. Hopkins from that obscurity.