Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (b. 1875–d. 1935) was born in New Orleans and raised there by her mother, Patricia Moore, a freedwoman of African American and Native American descent. She attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, earned a teaching degree at Straight (now Dillard) University, and taught in New Orleans’s black schools from 1892 to 1896. During those same years Dunbar-Nelson (then Alice Ruth Moore) became active in the black women’s club movement, both locally and nationally, and began publishing in black periodicals. At twenty she published her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), a collection of stories, sketches, poems, and essays that brought her local celebrity. Leaving the city in 1896, Dunbar-Nelson continued to dedicate herself to teaching, activism, and writing—three areas of passionate commitment that shaped the rest of her life. She taught in Boston, then in Brooklyn where she also helped the writer and reformer Victoria Earle Matthews found the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for black women, while finishing her short story collection The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). In 1898 she married the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, then at the height of his success. Their union advanced Alice’s literary career: she published Goodness with his press, Dodd, Mead and Company, and enjoyed positive reviews. But his fame also overshadowed her accomplishments; after her death she was remembered primarily as his wife until scholars R. Ora Williams and Akasha Hull recovered her from obscurity. Paul and Alice separated in 1902, partly because of his abuse. Nevertheless, she kept his name and, following his 1906 death, promoted his legacy with projects like her anthology, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). For the next thirty years Dunbar-Nelson lived in Wilmington, Delaware, teaching for eighteen of them at Howard High School. During this period she was briefly married to another teacher, Arthur Callis, and romantically involved with Edwina Kruse, an educator about whom she wrote an unpublished novel titled The Lofty Oak. She worked as a paid and unpaid organizer, writer, and speaker for myriad causes, including suffrage, the war effort, the peace movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), anti-lynching legislation, education reform, and electoral politics. Although she never published another book of her own work, Dunbar-Nelson was a recognized Harlem Renaissance writer whose poems, stories, plays, essays, and reviews appeared in Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Book of American Negro Poetry, and she wrote nationally syndicated newspaper columns. In 1932 Dunbar-Nelson moved with third husband Robert Nelson to Philadelphia, where she died of heart disease in 1935.