Alice Dunbar-Nelson Research Articles

Acts of Terrorism, or, violence on A Sunday Morning in the South

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966) was part of the group of black female writers who participated in the American theater's protest against the lynching that afflicted African Americans throughout the early twentieth century. (1) In concert with Ruth Gaines Shelton, Maude Cuney Hare, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Myrtle Livingston, Angelina Weld Grimke, Thelma Duncan, Mary Powell Burrill, Marita O. Bonner, Eulalie Spence, and May Miller, she produced literature which protested the practice of hanging, burning, shooting, or drowning accused blacks without due process of law. Her work substantiated the fact that black women were active and prolific writers during the male-dominated beginning of the twentieth century. Johnson and her black female colleagues published twenty-one plays among themselves, ten of which dramatized conflicts involving race and gender. Their protest plays indicate that African Americans did not react passively to the terrorism inflicted upon them, and their dramas reflect female African American responses to the brutality and inhumanity of lynching. With the exception of Angelina Grimke, (author of the three-act play Rachel [1916]), this aggregation of writers wrote one-act dramas. Georgia Douglas Johnson contributed A Sunday Morning in the South (1925) and Safe (1929) to the corpus of protest plays these writers produced between 1916 and 1929, the years encompassing the New Negro Renaissance, the black women's club movement, and the anti-lynching campaign. The present study is devoted to an examination of A Sunday Morning in the South, a work that has not been extensively analyzed. In particular, this study focuses on Johnson's use of the play as a vehicle to express the unique complications attending early twentieth-century black maternity. In addressing this issue, the play highlights the black mother's powerlessness to protect her children from racial violence in the absence of just laws and anti-lynching legislation. That the period's rampant acts of terrorism contributed to the precariousness of the black mother's hold on her children--particularly on her sons who were the preferred targets of lynch mobs--and that the violence militated against both her well-being and that of her community becomes alarmingly clear in a consideration of the play. A Sunday Morning in the South commands attention because it illustrates one way in which violence impinged upon early black maternity and because it sheds important light upon the justification for barbarities that many modern perpetrators of racial violence employ. Writing within the contexts of the anti-lynching campaign and the black women's club movement, Johnson, like other educated women of the black middle class (e.g. Ida Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell), was propelled by the twin demands for justice for the black race and for the African American woman. In her protest drama, Johnson bore testimony to the upsurge of violence committed against blacks and represented it in its most extreme form: lynching. The threat of lynching held the African American community hostage from Reconstruction through the first half of the twentieth century. As Ida Wells-Barnett argued in her 1892 speech Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, white America used lynching to strip Afro-America of its autonomy, its power, and its humanity (Campbell 148). Johnson and the black women activists, especially Wells-Barnett and Church-Terrell, were at the forefront of the anti-lynching movement, demanding immediate change in the socio-political status of African Americans. To this purpose, Johnson delineated in A Sunday Morning in the South the horrors of a southern lynching and called for the instant cessation of racial violence. Johnson's drama and the lectures, petitions, and rallies of the women activists reflected a radical posture that was absent on the part of black male leaders such as Booker T. Washington, who evidenced a conciliatory, go-slow attitude in attaining civil rights. …

Between Love and Hate, Black and White: Narcissism and Double-Consciousness in the Diaries of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

(2001). Between Love and Hate, Black and White: Narcissism and Double-Consciousness in the Diaries of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 17, Private Lives/Public Texts: Women's Literary Diaries and Journals, pp. 101-118.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Local Colors of Ethnicity, Class, and Place

Journal Article Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Local Colors of Ethnicity, Class, and Place Get access Kristina Brooks Kristina Brooks Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 23, Issue 2, June 1998, Pages 3–26, https://doi.org/10.2307/468009 Published: 01 June 1998

Harlem's glory: black women writing, 1900-1950

Part 1 and white tangled threads: sanctuary, Nella Larsen two gentlemen of Boston, Florida Ruffin Ridley little heads - a one-act play of negro life, Alvira Hazzard my two grandmothers, Aloise Barbour Epperson flower of the South, Gertrude Schalk masks, a story, Eloise Bibb Thompson the man who passed - a play in one act, Regina M. Andrews why, how, when and where black becomes white, Mary Church Terrell from Black and White Tangled Threads, Zara Wright. Part 2 Dreaming in colour: belated romance, Florence Marion Harmon the pink hat, Caroline Bond Day hope deferred, Alice Dunbar-Nelson Lai-Li, Mae V. Cowdery little Cornish, the Blue Boy, Effie Lee Newsome the noose, Octavia B. Wynbush if wishes were horses, Edythe Mae Gordon subversion, Edythe Mae Gordon. Part 3 Native daughter: to a wild rose, Ottie B. Graham the Zulu king - New Orleans (at Mardi Gras), Josephine Copeland negro folk songs, Josephine Copeland preface - other Bostonians, Florida Ruffin Ridley nativity, Gladys Casely Hayford a poem, Gladys Casely Hayford the palm wine seller, Gladys Casely Hayford rainy season love song, Gladys Casely Hayford is it not enough, Ida Rowland negroid things, Ida Rowland are we different?, Ida Rowland the family of Nat Turner, 1831-1954, Lucy Mae Turner where the west begins, from American Daughter, Era Bell Thompson from The Negro Trailblazers of California, Delilah Leontium Beasley native daughter - an indictment of white America by a coloured woman, Ellen Tarry. Part 4 Longings: calling dreams, Georgia Douglas Johnson question, Georgia Douglas Johnson my son, Georgia Douglas Johnson armageddon, Georgia Douglas Johnson interim, Georgia Douglas Johnson ivy, Georgia Douglas Johnson I wonder, Georgia Douglas Johnson afterglow, Georgia Douglas Johnson love's way - a Christmas story, Carrie W. Clifford joy, Clarissa Scott Delany the mask, Clarissa Scott Delany interim, Clarissa Scott Delany solace, Clarissa Scott Delany noblesse oblige, Jessie Fauset dead fires, Jessie Fauset oblivion, Jessie Fauset la vie c'est la vie, Jessie Fauset, words! words!, Jessie Fauset the eternal quest, Anita Scott Coleman in '61, Ethel Caution Davis longing, Ethal Caution Davis sunset, Ethel Caution Davis long remembering, Ethel Caution Davis longings, Nellie R. Bright. Part 5 Spunk: early days in Cleveland, from A Nickel and a Prayer, Jane Edna Hunter the negro today, Marion Vera Cuthbert a talk on evolution, Mercedes Gilbert the equal rights league, from Crusade for Justice, Ida B. Wells-Barnett to the oppressors, Pauli Murray Mr. Roosevelt regrets, Pauli Murray from Tales My Father Told and Other Stories, Hallie Quinn Brown spunk, Zora Neale Hurston. Part 6 My great, wide, beautiful world: black, Nellie R. Bright from African Journey, Eslanda Goode Robeson. (Part contents).

Womanist propaganda, African-American Great War experience, and cultural strategies of the Harlem Renaissance: Plays by Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary P. Burrill

Abstract Despite the continued prominence of First World War studies, and the current debate about the importance of the Great War to the development of Modernism, there has been scant recognition of Black literary responses to World War I. Yet it is acknowledged that the Great War was crucial to the emergence of “the New Negro” and the Harlem Renaissance. This article examines two Great War plays by African American women which foreground the political issues raised by African American conscription to fight in France during World War I. It argues that there was a distinct womanist response to atrocities (in Europe and USA) and that these propaganda plays, by early Harlem Renaissance writers — Dunbar-Nelson and Burrill — were part of an important womanist cultural strategy to lead changes in American society via education and women's networks.

Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century

Amidst the violent racism prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, African American cultural elites, struggling to articulate a positive black identity, developed a middle-class ideology of racial uplift. Insisting that they were truly representative of the race's potential, black elites espoused an ethos of self-help and service to the black masses and distinguished themselves from the black majority as agents of civilization; hence the phrase 'uplifting the race.' A central assumption of racial uplift ideology was that African Americans' material and moral progress would diminish white racism. But Kevin Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Hubert H. Harrison, and others, Gaines focuses on the intersections between race and gender in both racial uplift ideology and black nationalist thought, showing that the meaning of uplift was intensely contested even among those who shared its aims. Ultimately, elite conceptions of the ideology retreated from more democratic visions of uplift as social advancement, leaving a legacy that narrows our conceptions of rights, citizenship, and social justice. |Amidst the violent racism prevalent at the turn of the 20th century, African American cultural elites, struggling to articulate a positive black identity, developed a middle-class ideology of racial uplift. Insisting that they were truly representative of the race's potential, black elites espoused an ethos of self-help and service to the black masses and distinguished themselves from the black majority as agents of civilization; hence the phrase 'uplifting the race.' A central assumption of racial uplift ideology was that African Americans' material and moral progress would diminish white racism. But Kevin Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice.

The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this significant collection is the first definitive edition of Harlem Renaissance stories by women. The writers include Gwendolyn Bennett, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Dorothy West. Published originally in periodicals such as The Crisis, Fire!!, and Opportunity, these twenty-seven stories have until now been virtually unavailable to readers. These stories are as compelling today as they were in the 1920s and 1930s. In them, we find the themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplift the race. Marcy Knopf's introduction surveys the history of the Harlem Renaissance, the periodicals and books it generated, and describes the rise to prominence of these women writers and their later fall from fame. She also includes a brief biography of each of the writers. Nellie Y. McKay's foreword analyzes the themes and concerns of the stories.

An Examination of the Relationship Between Race and Gender in an Early Twentieth Century Drama: A Study of Angelina Weld Grimké's Play Rachel

Women playwrights before 1950 were full partners in theatre's protest against conditions for Blacks, whether in form of propaganda, folks plays or historical dramas. They also made unique perspective of Black women's reality a part of that protest. Not until mid-century, however, would their voices reach beyond their communities into highly competitive world of professional theatre.(1) Today when we think of black women playwrights names that come to mind are Ntozake Shange, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Adrienne Kennedy. The endeavors and inroads that these women have made and continue to make in drama could not have occurred without struggle and ground breaking works of early black women playwrights such as Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Mary Burill, Myrtle Smith Livingston, Ruth Gaines-Shelton, Eulalie Spence, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner. These black women playwrights, and several others, published over sixty plays and pageants in addition to writing several unpublished texts.(2) Yet, despite these achievements, black female playwrights of first half of twentieth century have often been overlooked and pushed aside regardless of their contributions to American and black theater. Extreme racial and gender oppression best explains why black female playwright was not recognized prior to 1950. Forces of racism and sexism erected barriers so that blacks, overall, could not achieve any significant status in American drama, and for black women playwriting as a profession was considered a male vocation.(3) Women, on other hand, were encouraged to pursue more acceptable, feminine genres such as poetry or fiction.(4) Being both black and female, therefore, limited black woman's progress as a playwright. Consequently, due to racial and gender barriers, work of black female playwrights was slow to emerge. Prior to Lorraine Hansberry's production of A Raisin in Sun on Broadway in 1959, black women dramatists were slow to evolve because of their limited access to staging their works and because of stereotypes they had to combat. Like their male counterparts, early black female playwrights were writing against stereotypical portrayals of blacks on stage by white playwrights. Commonly for black men, stereotypical images were those of comic buffoon, lazy shiftless Uncle Tom, and savage brute, while for black women there were sexless domineering mammy types, loose trolops, and tragic mulattoes. White-authored productions, such as minstrel shows, helped to enforce these distorted images of black people because they were most popular form of theater in America for nearly a century.(5) Moreover, even when white playwrights attempted to celebrate Negro, their endeavors only ended in reinscribing existing stereotypes. For example, white playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, William Vaughn Moody, Marc Connelly, and Paul Green, all, at some point, used as their subject matter in an attempt to valorize black people. However, these well-intentioned white representations of black life and black people in drama did no more than reinforce stereotypes already fixed about blacks. Whether savage brute image changed to noble savage in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones or if Negro themes were expressed in Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom, the work of many white playwrights did not address experiences of Blacks in any serious way.(6) For this reason, it became important for both black female and male playwrights to re-create or re-invent reality in their plays in order to demystify white stereotypes of blacks. It was work of black women dramatists, however, which captured lives of black people as no white or black male playwright could.(7) They created a reality that brought in dynamic of gender in addition to focus on race in their works. …

Surveying the intersection: pathology, secrecy, and the discourses of racial and sexual identity.

"Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity" cautions against the risks of metaphorical imperialism in readings of codified gay and lesbian representation. Taking issue with Foucault's suggestion that the secret of the nineteenth century was the secret of sex, I suggest that, in nineteenth-century American culture, where African-American identity and equality were among the most controversial issues of the century, the secrets of identity were secrets of race as well. Because scientific and literary representations of pathological and/or secret, essential identities are sites of intersection in the discourses of homosexual and mixed-race identity, they should be investigated as intersections, rather than read as codifications of sexual difference. Surveying the discourses of scientific racism, genetics, and eugenics, and doing readings of Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "The Stones of the Village," I suggest that Harper's representation of the mulatto leader can be read as an act of resistance to the representation of the mulatto as a degenerate, hybrid species; and that in Dunbar-Nelson's story, the thematics of passing, secrecy, and the fear of detection, while having a recognizably homoerotic quality, should not be read simply as a codification of homosexual difference and panic. I conclude with a call for more work on historicizing the intersection of racial and sexual identity in the discourses of pathology and degeneration.

Shadowed dreams: women's poetry of the Harlem Renaissance

The first edition of Shadowed Dreams was a groundbreaking anthology that brought to light the contributions of women poets to the Harlem Renaissance. This revised and expanded version contains twice the number of poems found in the original, many of them never before reprinted, and adds eighteen new voices to the collection to once again strike new ground in African American literary history. Also new to this edition are nine period illustrations and updated biographical introductions for each poet. Shadowed Dreams features new poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Anita Scott Coleman, Mae Cowdery, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke, Gladys Casely Hayford (a.k.a Aquah Laluah), Virginia Houston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Effie Lee Newsome, Esther Popel, and Anne Spencer, as well as writings from newly discovered poets Carrie Williams Clifford, Edythe Mae Gordon, Alvira Hazzard, Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, Beatrice Murphy, Lucia Mae Pitts, Grace Vera Postles, Ida Rowland, and Lucy Mae Turner, among others. Covering the years 1918 through 1939 and ranging across the period's major and minor journals, as well as its anthologies and collections, Shadowed Dreams provides a treasure trove of poetry from which to mine deeply buried jewels of black female visions in the early twentieth century.

Pictures My Mother Left Me, Growing Up

Gloria Hull, a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, is best known as a teacher (professor of English and women's studies, University of Delaware) and black feminist literary critic (All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies; Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson; and Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance). However, since 1975, she has also published poems in Women: A Journal of Liberation, Callaloo, Conditions, Chrysalis, Obsidian, Ikon, and other journals.