Colored Co-Operative Publishing Company

Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Publishers

Colored Co-Operative Publishing Company

Founded:	1900
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History

Printer of The Colored American Magazine, which was published from 1900-1909 and is of great cultural, historical, and literary significance. The magazine's editors and publishers included such prominent African American figures as Booker T. Washington and the novelist Pauline Hopkins, and it was one of the first general magazines to address itself to an aspirational and genteel African American readership. Its content included short stories, essays, and serialized novels. The magazine initially focused on black history, biographies of notable African American men and women, and, most of all, literature.

The magazine's publishing structure also extended its focus on African American interests, marrying business with literary endeavors. The magazine was launched under the umbrella of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, founded by Walter Wallace, Jesse W. Watkins, Harper S. Fortune, and Walter Alexander Johnson. Hazel Carby has written that "[t]he Colored Co-operative Publishing company was an attempt to attain both financial and editorial control in a publishing enterprise, to found a race literature, and to preserve the history of black Americans" (120). Readers could become members of the publishing company by "an investment of cash over five dollars" (124). Advertisements for books sold by the Colored Co-operative fill the pages of the magazine, and the history of the magazine cannot be separated from that of the company, which has been understudied by scholars.