This Day In History: July 19th
Writer, educator and activist Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson used her talents to address complex issues pertaining to race and gender. She published her first book at the age of 20 and continued to release poems, essays and short stories for another 40 years.
She was born Alice Ruth Moore on July 19, 1875, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dunbar-Nelson was bi-racial which helped to shape her understanding of the content she produced. She attended Straight University (now Dillard University) and graduated in 1892. Prior to getting her start as a journalist, Moore began her career teaching elementary students.
In 1895, Moore’s first collection of short stories, Violets and Other Tales, was published by The Monthly Review. The publication caught the attention of fellow writer Paul Laurence Dunbar. They developed an initial relationship through letters, but Dunbar proposed to her in 1897 and the two eloped in 1898.
She relocated to Washington, D.C., and published The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories in 1899. Although Dunbar-Nelson started finding success as a writer, her personal life was filled with turbulence and often violence from her marriage. She left Dunbar in 1902 and moved to Wilmington, Delaware. Dunbar-Nelson continued writing but she also made a return to teaching at facilities such as the State College for Colored Students (now Delaware State University), and Howard University. However, she remarried in 1910 but was divorced a short time later.
In 1914, she published Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence. Two years later, she married fellow journalist and activist Robert J. Nelson. Dunbar-Nelson was no stranger to political engagement, She supported the NAACP, helped to organize during the women’s suffrage movement and served as a field representative for the Woman’s Committee of the Council of Defense. She also campaigned for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill and served as executive secretary of the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee for three years.
Towards the end of her career, Dunbar-Nelson became a popular feature in Black newspapers and edited The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer. She relocated from Delaware to Philadelphia in 1932 but remained an active writer. Alice Dunbar-Nelson died on September 18, 1935, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
