User:Jreale1/Pauline Hopkins

Colored American Magazine[edit]
From the beginning of the nine-year run of the Colored American Magazine, Hopkins served as a major contributor to the periodical's success. Hopkins short story "The Mystery Within Us" was included in the first issue of Colored American Magazine, a monthly periodical started by the same company who published Hopkins' novel Contending Forces in the same year. She was named Editor of the Women's Department by the second issue, and Literary Editor by November 1903. In addition, she would go on to write sketches for the periodical known as "Famous Women of the Negro Race" and "Famous Men of the Negro Race." This series gave recognition to many of the influential Black figures of the time through detailing their lives and legacies, including abolitionist William Wells Brown, the same inspiration who had awarded her for her essay-writing ability as a teenager nearly three decades earlier. She sometimes used the pseudonym Sarah A. Allen. Pauline Hopkins was beginning to make a reputation for herself. As a result of this, she was offered the opportunity to become a member of the board of directors, a shareholder and a creditor of the Colored American Magazine. Along with her writing, she helped to increase subscriptions and raise funding for the magazine as a co-founder of "The American Colored League," which was an organization started in 1904 with the mission of promoting the interests of the Colored American. These roles alone helped her break into the literary world, with her work making up a substantial amount of the literary and historical materials promoted by the magazine. She would continue to work for the magazine until she left in September 1804 due to health complications. By the her issue, a total of six of Hopkins' short stories had been published in the magazine including the well-known mystery "Talma Gordon," as well as two of her novels Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest and Of One Blood or The Hidden Self.

Death
In the years leading up to her death, Hopkins was actively employed as a stenographer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On August 12, 1930, she died from injuries sustained after an accident, during which bandages that she was wearing on her arms to treat her neuritis, soaked in liniment, caught aflame from an oil stove that she had in her room. She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was buried in the Garden Cemetery in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Despite the fact that she had resided in the area during the course of most of her life's work, there was no record of her death posted in the local obituaries. Both The Chicago Defender and the Baltimore-Afro-American newspapers reported on her death, wrongly citing her age of death as "79". The Cambridge Death Records of the Massachusetts Department of Vital Statistics confirm that her actual age of death was 71.