Augustus M. Hodges

Augustus Michael Hodges, a late-nineteenth-century Black writer and journalist who wrote under the pen name "B. Square," is the subject of this engraved portrait published in I. Garland Penn's The Afro-American Press, and Its Editors (1891). Though his professional writing life was centered in New York, Hodges spent substantial time in Virginia and graduated from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in 1874. His father, Willis A. Hodges, moved between the two states and worked variously as a farmer, an antislavery activist, a minister, and a newspaper editor; after the Civil War, he became a prominent Black Virginia politician.