Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was an author, activist, and educator who found joy in reading and writing from a young age. She launched her career as a poet, playwright, essayist, fiction writer, and journalist in New Orleans, where she was born and raised by her mother, a seamstress who had been enslaved. (Her father’s identity is unknown but he is thought to have been a member of the merchant marines). She graduated from a teaching program at Straight University, now Dillard University, and became a public school instructor. She published her first book, Violets and Other Tales, a collection of poems, essays and stories, when she was 20. In 1896, she left New Orleans, with her mother and sister, for Massachusetts, where she continued to contribute to The Woman’s Era, the first national newspaper published by and for Black women in the U.S. In 1897, she moved to New York and helped to found the White Rose Mission, a settlement home on the Upper East Side that served Black women and children.

In 1898, she married her first husband, Paul Laurence Dunbar, a celebrated Black poet, and moved to Washington, D.C. Her second book, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Short Stories, featuring the Creole culture of New Orleans, came out in 1899. Her marriage to Dunbar was troubled, and his physical abuse led her to separate from him permanently in 1902. After his death from tuberculosis in 1906, she championed his poetry as part of her ongoing commitment to celebrating African American literature.

When she left Dunbar, she moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught English at Howard High School. She began a long-term relationship with Edwina B. Kruse, the school principal; this was one of several relationships she had with women as well as men. Later, she taught at Delaware State College and Howard University and became co-editor of the A.M.E. Review, an African American journal of politics, religion, and history. 

A committed activist, she joined the women’s suffrage movement, fought for anti-lynching legislation, advocated for Black children to be taught literature by Black authors, and edited collections of work by Black writers and orators. During the First World War, she organized women’s groups to support war efforts, and she was active in the Circle of Negro War Relief, establishing a local chapter to assist black soldiers and their families. Her war poem “I Sit and Sew” (1918) is her most frequently anthologized work. 

In 1916, she married journalist and political activist Robert J. Nelson, a partnership that lasted until her death. In the 1920s, she was recognized as a significant Harlem Renaissance writer. A lifelong literary enthusiast, she kept a reading journal for two decades. She published poetry and columns in Black newspapers like the Wilmington Advocate, which she co-edited with Nelson. She often visited Philadelphia, and she moved there in 1932. She continued to give talks on politics and stayed active in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, writing the sorority’s national hymn only a few months before her death. She died from heart disease in 1935.