- Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935), one of the first African American women to voice the “lyric cry” of the Harlem Renaissance, was unique as both a precursor to and central participant in the movement. The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, edited by her and dedicated to the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, to whom she was briefly married, was the movement’s first anthology. Educated as an English teacher at Straight University (now Dillard) in her native New Orleans, she found early success as a writer of short stories exploring the lives of the region’s Creoles and Cajuns. Her careers included public lecturer, parole officer, suffragist, politician, and civic worker. She headed the Anti-Page 414 →Lynching Crusade in Delaware and helped to draft the Black clubwomen’s 1920 political manifesto, A Platform of the Colored Women of America. Although certainly best known for her still-uncollected poems, particularly “I Sit and Sew,” and now for her remarkable diary, Dunbar Nelson was known during the period as a prolific journalist whose essays, book reviews, and stage reviews appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis, Opportunity, and Colliers.
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