Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South

In 1900, a mere 35 years after the Civil War had ended the practice of one human being owning another, Pauline Hopkins, black and female, publishedContending Forces,whose rediscovery here shocks us into recognition that our national literature does indeed con­tain examples of black awareness and pride. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Pauline Hopkins writes of the injustices suffered by blacks at the hands of whites. But her novel penetrates deeper thanUncle Tom's Cabin.Nor is the white man the sole devil in Hopkins's fiction; there are the contending forces: "Conservatism, lack of brotherly affiliation, lack of energy for the right and the power of the almighty dollar which deadens men's hearts to the sufferings of their brothers, and makes them feel that if onlytheycan rise to the top of the ladder may God help the hindermost man, are . . . the contending forces that are dooming this race to despair." Very little is known about this re­markable author. She was born in 1859in Portland, Maine, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1930. In the 19001904 period, she was a member of the staff ofColored American Magazine,the most important black magazine of the time. Her novel was published in Boston by The Colored Co-operative Publishing Co.Hopkins, Pauline E. is the author of 'Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South', published 1978 under ISBN 9780809308743 and ISBN 0809308746.