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 Creole society of New Orleans. She would later graduate from Dillard University and worked in the public school system of New Orleans. 

Though she is known widely for her poetry, she also wrote short stories and essays, and edited A.M.E. Review, and "published Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence in 1914". She was married twice, first to the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898, but the couple separated after four years of marriage, perhaps because of the increasing alcoholism Paul Laurence Dunbar suffered later in life. She married again in 1910 to Arther Callis, but divorced him; a third marriage followed in 1916 to Robert J. Nelson. Her marriages occurred amid a thriving career in literary circles, as well as her activism: she lobbied for women's suffrage and for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Meanwhile, her poetry was published in such notable magazines as The Crisis (literary magazine of the NAACP), and Opportunity, published by the Urban League (1). 

Much of her work addresses the roles of black women in racial politics and the anti-lynching campaign of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Such poems as "I Sit and Sew" reflects one woman's frustration over the desire to become politically involved; however, she is relegated to domestic tasks because of gender conventions. Though Alice Dunbar Nelson's life fully realized an active role in politics of race, her poetry nonetheless reveals the damning influences of prescriptions of one's role on the basis of gender.