This dissertation is the first longitudinal study and literary history of the "Southern Workman" (1872-1939), a periodical published by the Black industrial school and American Indian boarding school, Hampton Institute in Virginia. It analyzes literary and nonfiction writings about citizenship published in the "Southern Workman" to explore how and why Hampton’s central mouthpiece became a rich site of multiethnic American writing between 1890 and 1920. I reconsider the ways in which literary studies have privileged the bound book by examining Black and Native writing in periodicals. Such a reframing not only unsettles assumptions about how we conceive of American literature and writers but also sheds light on how marginalized populations harnessed the periodical press as a tool of resistance and uplift. Across genres, writers in the "Southern Workman" negotiated, and often eschewed, U.S. citizenship by instead placing value on what I call “coalition citizenship.” On the one hand, the term refers to the multiracial coalition of intellectuals whose writings were featured in the "Southern Workman." Yet, this community of writers also contested the idea of a national “coalition.” I explore how writers instead cultivate alternative forms of citizenship through the formation and strengthening of social, cultural, racial, and familial coalitions within, but often separate from, the larger U.S. At the crossroads of three contributor bases and audiences—Black, White, and Native—the placement of “White” at the center of my subtitle gestures toward the ways Black and Native voices were mediated through the periodical’s White editorship and how writers engaged various forms of rhetoric in navigating such constraints.