Who was Alice Dunbar-Nelson?
Several leading male literary lights of the
1920s Harlem Renaissance were queer, but their Sapphic forerunner Alice
Dunbar-Nelson is less well-known. Bisexual and of mixed race,
Dunbar-Nelson also crossed boundaries of literary genres.
Dunbar-Nelson was born Alice Ruth Moore in
New Orleans in July 1875, to a merchant seaman and a seamstress. Of Creole
heritage, she had light skin and auburn hair, for which she was
relentlessly tormented by her black classmates. A precocious girl, she
entered Straight College (now Dillard University) at age 15, completing a
teacher training program in two years; she would later continue her
education at Cornell University, Columbia, and the University of
Pennsylvania.
Dunbar-Nelson began her career as a public
school teacher in her hometown and also exercised her talent for writing.
At age 20, she published Violets and Other Tales (1895), likely the
first-ever short story collection by an African-American woman. Shortly
thereafter, she joined the “great migration” of southern blacks to
northern cities, settling first in Boston and later in New York City,
where she was active in community work and co-founded the White Rose
Mission settlement house for girls in Harlem.
Dunbar-Nelson’s writing and photo in a
literary magazine captured the attention of “Negro Poet Laureate” Paul
Laurence Dunbar. In 1898, after corresponding for two years, they eloped
over the objections of her family, who eschewed Dunbar’s dark skin and
limited financial means. Though some in the community held them up as the
ideal African-American couple—a sort of black Robert and Elizabeth
Browning—their relationship was stormy, exacerbated by Dunbar’s
alcoholism and depression. In 1902, after Dunbar beat her nearly to death,
Dunbar-Nelson left him and moved to Delaware, never to see him again;
Dunbar died four years later, at age 34.
As many school boards at the time did not
employ married women, Dunbar-Nelson gave up teaching during her marriage
and focused on writing. She became known for her chronicles of Creole life
in Louisiana, using the local patois for her characters’ voices.
According to scholar Gloria Hull, Dunbar-Nelson “helped to create a
black short story tradition for a reading public conditioned to expect
only plantation and minstrel stereotypes.” Dunbar-Nelson’s stories
often addressed the social limitations placed on women, as well as issues
of identity and crossing color lines. Light-skinned enough to pass for
white (which she occasionally did, for example, to attend segregated
theaters), Dunbar-Nelson was accused by some contemporaries of being
prejudiced toward darker blacks, especially the poor and uneducated. Yet
rather than assimilate into white society, she became an increasingly
vocal advocate for black empowerment and racial equality.
In Delaware, Dunbar-Nelson took a teaching
job at all-black Howard High School in Wilmington, where she entered a
long same-sex relationship with its German/Puerto Rican principal, Edwina
Kruse. After that affair cooled, Dunbar-Nelson married Henry Arthur Callis,
a fellow teacher 12 years her junior, but that lasted only about a year.
She married her third husband, African-American journalist and civil
rights activist Robert Nelson, in 1916. Nelson learned of her extramarital
lesbian liaisons—including those with journalist Fay Jackson Robinson
and artist Helene London—by reading her diary; despite occasional fits
of rage, however, he tolerated these affairs, and the marriage lasted
until Dunbar-Nelson’s death.
In 1920, Dunbar-Nelson was fired from her
teaching job due to her increasing political activism on issues ranging
from women’s suffrage to anti-lynching laws. “Lynchings only occur
where Negroes are afraid,” she once wrote. “When they cease to fear,
the white man turns tail and skulks away.” During World War I, she
served on the woman’s committee of the Council of National Defense,
which managed the domestic war effort, and later became executive
secretary of the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee. Though a
progressive social justice advocate with no children of her own, she
espoused conservative views about working mothers at a time when black
women were taking non-domestic jobs and having fewer children.
“Churches, social agencies, schools, and Sunday schools cannot do the
work of mothers and heads of families,” she wrote. “The training of
human souls needs to begin at home in the old-fashioned family life.”
Less inspired to write poetry and short
stories as the years went on, Dunbar-Nelson increasingly turned to
journalism, co-editing the Wilmington Advocate (a progressive black paper)
with her husband and penning popular newspaper columns. Her circle
included leading black activists such as W.E.B. DuBois and Mary McLeod
Bethune, and during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, she
was friends with up-and-coming literary stars such as Langston Hughes. In
failing health in the early ‘30s, Dunbar-Nelson moved with her husband
to Philadelphia, where she died of heart failure in September 1935.
Dunbar-Nelson burned her lesbian love poems
before her death, but her diary (which included snippets of the lost
poems) survived. The journal, according to historian Lillian Faderman,
“reveals the existence of an active black bisexual network among
prominent ‘club women’ who had husbands but managed to enjoy lesbian
liaisons as well as a camaraderie with one another over their shared
secrets.”
Liz Highleyman is a freelance writer and
editor who has written widely on health, sexuality, and politics. She can
be reached care of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth or at PastOut@qsyndicate.com.
For further reading:
Alexander, Eleanor. 2001. Lyrics of
Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence
Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore (New York University Press).
Faderman, Lillian. 1991. Odd Girls and
Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
(Columbia University Press).
Hull, Gloria. 1987. Color, Sex, and Poetry:
Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press).
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