- Born
- 19 July 1875New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
- Died
- 18 September 1935Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA · aged 60
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
A writer, teacher and suffragist, she left diaries and letters that also preserve her relationships with women.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born in New Orleans in 1875. Originally named Alice Ruth Moore, she grew up in a Creole family, trained as a teacher and published “Violets and Other Tales” in 1895.
In 1898 she married the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The marriage was marked by abuse, and they separated in 1902. She later taught at Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware, while writing poems, stories, essays and newspaper columns. “I Sit and Sew” (1918) gives voice to a woman frustrated by the limits placed on her during the First World War.
Dunbar-Nelson campaigned for women’s suffrage and against lynching, bringing her skills as a speaker and journalist to Black civic organisations. She married twice after her separation from Dunbar; her final husband was the journalist Robert J. Nelson.
Her diaries, published in 1984 as “Give Us Each Day”, and her correspondence record a private life that public accounts had largely left out. They document relationships with women, including the educator Edwina Kruse. Together with her published writing, these records show the demands of earning a living, pursuing political change and sustaining intimate relationships as a Black woman in the early twentieth century. She died in 1935.