More than a decade after her severance from Boston's Colored American Magazine (CAM), Pauline Hopkins retained a politically charged philosophy of African-American arts and letters, as evidenced by her pronouncements heralding the publication of New Era Magazine. Colleagues from the Colored American might have been surprised by the stridency of her call to action, but none would have been shocked by its militancy or insistence upon community-based, collective action.

By the time of this final acknowledgment of the collaborative nature and resultant power of the periodical press, Hopkins had resolved the earlier problematic issue of the relationship between the public self and history. For black America the periodical press could not afford to be ephemeral; it had consciously to shape and nurture its nascent history. In her culminating effacement of self as historian, Hopkins ceded authority to the magazine and, by extension, to the African-American periodical press at large.