Harlem Renaissance writer, educator, suffragist, organizer

Site: 1310 North French Street (private); East Side Brandywine National Register District

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was an accomplished writer of poetry and fiction, a social and political commentator, educator, organizer, Civil Rights advocate and Suffragist. Her New Orleans experience and her multi-racial heritage gave voice to her stories and authority to her commentaries on culture and the color line in American society. She has been described as bold, determined, ambitious, unapologetic, power-conscious, difficult to impress, brilliant at debate, and laser sharp in her ability to assess the world around her, especially as she pushed for rights owed to Black Americans and women. She also was a steady advocate of excellence in the arts, free from race and gender expectations. Dunbar-Nelson enhanced the formal, classical education of her youth by becoming a lifelong consumer of books, periodicals, performances, lectures and intelligent debate wherever she could find it. She moved in an extended circle of educated Black Americans and was considered an influential figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

Dunbar-Nelson’s tenure in Wilmington began in 1902, when she left Washington, D.C. and her brief, tumultuous marriage to acclaimed Black poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar. She joined the supportive, mostly female household of her mother, Patricia Wright Moore, her recently widowed sister, Mary Leila Young, and Leila’s children, in a narrow, rented row house on French Street, in the East Side city neighborhood. In that home was her beloved niece, Pauline Alice Young, who became a dedicated, outspoken educator and activist of the next generation. Pauline reminisced about her childhood home as something of a wayside inn for visiting Black and white literary friends. These included luminaries such as W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes and William Weldon Johnson, as Alice recorded in diaries that survive. The extended family, which added Alice’s third husband, publisher and politician Robert J. Nelson in 1916, moved from 916 French Street in 1924 to 1310 French, which Dunbar-Nelson purchased. From her often-crowded house, Dunbar-Nelson sought solitude walking at night in Cool Spring Park, and sitting out on her East Side roof, as she looked at the lights on the river and added her thoughts to a journal. In 1932, Robert, Alice and her sister, Leila, moved to Philadelphia when Robert was offered a position with the Philadelphia Athletic Commission. Alice continued writing until her death in 1935 at age 60.

Dunbar-Nelson’s activism took many forms, including education, community organization, and political protest. She held teaching and administrative posts in New Orleans, Brooklyn, Delaware and Virginia over a span of 37 years in segregated public schools and private institutions. Along with fellow members of the State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, she co-founded The Industrial School for Colored Girls near Marshallton, Delaware, to address the needs of delinquent and homeless young women of color. Following her dismissal from Howard High School in 1920 (ostensibly for her absences related to social and political activism), she focused on administration and teaching at the Industrial School from 1920-1928. The school was renamed the “Kruse Home for Girls” in 1943 after co-founder Edwina Kruse, principal of Howard High School and Dunbar-Nelson’s mentor and intimate friend.

As a seemingly tireless community organizer, Dunbar-Nelson managed WWI relief efforts and contributed to the women’s suffrage campaign at the same time. She was active in the Circle of Negro War Relief, which provided support to Black soldiers and their families. She also toured the South in 1918 as the only known Black field representative for the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, gathering information and helping Black women in nine states to organize war relief efforts. Beginning In 1915 Dunbar-Nelson was a field organizer for the Middle Atlantic States in the campaign for Women’s Suffrage, laboring for four months in Pennsylvania in support of an ultimately unsuccessful state referendum. She engaged in particularly vigorous print debates with male Black anti-Suffragists and, along with Blanche Williams Stubbs, engaged Wilmington women in the debate through the Equal Suffrage Study Club. In May of 1914 this club marched in Wilmington’s first substantial suffrage parade, organized by the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (later renamed The National Woman’s Party), and headed by the outspoken Delaware and national leader, Florence Bayard Hilles. Both Hilles and Dunbar-Nelson reached across the color barrier, occasionally attending and speaking at the same conventions and meetings in an attempt to unite and fortify the campaign. Following the passage of the 19th Amendment, Dunbar Nelson organized voter registration drives for Black women in Wilmington, resulting in a strong turnout for the 1920 election. 1 She also was active in the efforts to have the Amendment ratified. In addition to Suffrage activities, Dunbar also was an organizer and charter member of the Wilmington chapter of the NAACP in 1915.

Dunbar-Nelson became the first Black woman on the State Republican Committee in Delaware, and by 1921 was chair of the League of Colored Republican Women. She campaigned vigorously for the party and for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, fueled since the 1890s and introduced in 1918. As Southern Democrats actively resisted the measure and Republicans fretted over potential political consequences, Dunbar-Nelson showed her utter disgust by becoming a Democrat.

Throughout her adult life, Dunbar-Nelson shared her observations on society, arts, culture, and politics through speaking engagements and writing for periodicals. What has been called her “journalistic activism” is, perhaps, the least well known of her endeavors, but may have been the most important. In 1913 she co-edited the AME Church Review, one of the most influential publications of the era. NAACP’s Crisis and the Urban League’s Opportunity published her articles. She contributed syndicated opinion columns to Black newspapers across the country, including “Une Femme Dit” for the Pittsburgh Courier and “As in a Looking Glass” for the Negro Press Association. With husband Robert Nelson, she co-produced the progressive Black newspaper, The Wilmington Advocate, from 1920-1922 from their home at 916 French Street, which housed even the printing press. In 1921, she was a featured speaker at the Sixth Annual Convention of the Delaware State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (meeting at Wilmington’s Ezion Church at 9th and French Streets), which sent a resolution to the Governor to block the KKK in Delaware. Dunbar-Nelson’s sharp observations and persistent advocacy for Civil Rights helped to push the political needle forward.

Read

Hull, Gloria T.

1984 Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. W.W. Norton & Co., New York

Hull, Gloria T., editor

1988 The Works of Alice Dunbar Nelson, Volumes 1&2. Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford.

References:

Brossman, Romy and Sarah Killinger

2000 “Wilmington as Experienced by Alice Dunbar-Nelson,” in Wilmington’s African American Cultural Resources: A Collection of Research Papers. Center for Historic Architecture and Design, University of Delaware, for City of Wilmington, DE. On file, Dept. of Planning.

Broussard, Jinx Coleman

2004 Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists. Routledge, NY and London. https://books.google.com/books/about/Giving_a_Voice_to_the_Voiceless.html?id=SQTQJk84HY0C Accessed June 3, 2019.

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, “Alice Dunbar-Nelson.” Contemporary Black Biography series. https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/social-sciences-and-law/political-science-biographies/alice-dunbar-nelson#3444700404 Accessed June 03, 2019.

Erickson, Dr. Jesse Ryan

2019 Alice Dunbar-Nelson Reads Project: The Reading History of an Early 20th Century Bibliophile. University of Delaware. https://sites.udel.edu/alicereads/ Accessed June 3, 2019.

Garvey, Ellen Gruber

2019 How a New Exhibit Corrects Our Skewed Understanding of Women’s Suffrage. Washington Post, March 14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/29/how-new-exhibit-corrects-our-skewed-understanding-womens-suffrage/?utm_term=.a54546d27f1e Accessed March 30, 2019.

Gibson, Judith

1996 Mighty Oaks: Five Black Educators. In A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Carole C. Marks, editor. Delaware Heritage Press, Wilmington.

Staples, Brent

1985 She Was Hard to Impress. Review of Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Gloria T. Hull. New York Times, April 14. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/14/books/she-was-hard-to-impress.html Accessed March 30, 2019.

University of Delaware Collections Finding Aid, Alice Dunbar Nelson Papers. http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/dunbarne.html Accessed June 3, 2019.



[1] Personal communication on suffrage interactions of Hilles and Dunbar-Nelson, 6/13/19, Dr. Anne Boylan, Professor Emerita of History and Women and Gender Studies, University of Delaware.

Wikipedia: Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Pauline Young. Accessed June 3, 2019.