Year Honored: 2022

Birth: 1875 - 1935

Born in: New Orleans, Louisiana

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a Black woman poet, novelist, journalist, educator, and political activist who shifted American literature and politics in the 20th century. Dunbar-Nelson was born Alice Ruth Moore on July 19, 1875 in New Orleans, Louisiana. After graduating from Straight University (now Dillard University) in 1892, Dunbar-Nelson worked as an English teacher, and later moved to Boston and New York city to continue her career.

In addition to being an educator, Dunbar-Nelson was a writer and published her first collection of poetry, Violets and Other Tales, in 1895. In 1897, she co-founded the White Rose Mission (also known as the White Rose Home for Colored Working Girls) with suffragist and activist Victoria Earle Matthews. Around this same time, Dunbar-Nelson began correspondence with poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the start of their romantic, yet tragic, relationship. In 1898, Paul and Alice married, but divorced shortly after in 1902 due to domestic and sexual violence. She married her second husband Henry Arthur Callis in 1910, and would later marry her third husband, Robert J. Nelson, in 1916.

Dunbar-Nelson moved to Wilmington, Delaware in 1902 with her mother, sister, nieces, and nephew where she chaired the English Department at Howard High School, the only school for Black children in the state of Delaware at that time. She also formed a close working and romantic relationship with Howard High’s principal Edwina B. Kruse. Dunbar-Nelson was crucial to the women’s suffragist movement as seen through her co-founding of the Equal Suffrage Club in 1914 and the Women’s Committee of the Council of Defense in 1918. She also campaigned for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Dunbar-Nelson was an active member of the Wilmington Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and founded the Industrial School for Colored Girls in 1924.

Along with her husband Robert, Dunbar-Nelson was co-editor of the Wilmington Advocate and the A.M.E. Review. She spent the rest of her life as an advocate for civil rights, peace, and women’s international cooperation, while also pursuing her career as a writer, poet, journalist, and teacher.
Dunbar-Nelson passed away from heart failure at the age of 60 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 18, 1935.