Alice Dunbar Nelson: Activist and Poet
Like many of the women of the early twentieth century whom we've studied so far, Alice Dunbar Nelson wore many hats during her career. She is credited as poet, educator, activist, and diarist. Her Creole background lent itself to her "complex understandings of gender, race, and ethnicity," and, like Nella Larsen, integrated such understandings into her creative work. However, one source observes that many of her works that dealt with political and racial issues were ignored by publishers, which made her work nearly inaccessible to readers for a time. In 1895 she published her first volume of poetry, Violets and Other Tales when she was only twenty years old; later in 1899 came the collection, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories . Alice Dunbar Nelson was born Alice Ruth Moor in New Orleans in 1875 to a white father and an African American mother. Among the first generation African Americans to be born free, she and her family were members of the elite...
