Writing, Citizenship, Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson is a crucial focus for recovery. Her writing, her activism, and her struggles are resources for us as we fight the horrors of our own time. Throughout her life, Jim Crow reigned and white supremacy was virulent. African American resistance was increasingly organized, and Dunbar- Nelson herself always persisted. She taught Black teachers and high school students; she lectured on politics and African American literature; she organized the Delaware branch of the NAACP; she headed the Delaware Anti-Lynching Crusaders; she was always an active club member; she always wrote—and this account is not exhaustive. She was extraordinary. In saying this, I don't mean to be a Dunbar-Nelson exceptionalist, because she is one of many extraordinary activist-intellectuals—writers who are being recovered, or should be, including her friend and mentor Victoria Earle Matthews.

Among the many rewards of recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson is the opportunity she offers to reflect on a current proclivity, one to which I am susceptible: to want venerable figures like her to be not only heroic but perfect—to think in terms of pure or impure, good or bad, rather than recognizing that they used the resources available to them and exploring how they did so. For we do them, and ourselves, a grave disservice if we take recovery as the obligation to elide or smooth over messiness and complications. However hard it might be—and I find it hard—we must reckon with apparent shortcomings or blind spots. To remain curious in this way about every aspect of our heroes is far different from calling them out. It recognizes the myopia of requiring them to have been all "good." Not only that: it requires us to temper the expectation that we and our contemporaries make no mistakes. I'm not advocating mistakes, but to expect not to make them is worse than unrealistic: too often it goes hand-in-hand with self-protective fearfulness or with self-righteousness, both of which foreclose the struggles and changes essential for democracy.

Consider Alice Dunbar-Nelson's insistence on full citizenship for African Americans—her faith in democracy. She identified citizenship partly as the right to vote and to vote effectively. By the age of twenty she actively supported women's right to vote; in 1915, at age forty, she was a paid suffrage field worker. Once Black women could vote in northern states, she became a Republican; she was the first Black woman to serve on Delaware's Republican State Committee. In an essay on Delaware she emphasized the leverage Black voters had because, comprising 12 percent of the state's population, "the Negro in the state is the absolute political balance of power. The Republican party can never win an election without him, and the Democratic party can easily ride into office on his shoulders when he takes a notion to assert his independence" ("Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Delaware" 218). In 1922, outraged when a Delaware Republican senator and congressman helped kill the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, she joined other Black women in campaigning against elected Republican officials and, in her words, "the Negroes rose in their might and swept the Republican party out of power" ("Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Delaware" 218).

Hers was an effective strategy: punish Republicans and keep Democrats on guard in a small state where African American voters could function as a bloc. Her position in 1924 is more complicated. She headed the Democratic Party effort to mobilize Black women and wrote "A Call to Colored Women" for a pamphlet titled Facts for Colored Voters.¹ Although initially hesitant to discuss this essay because some of it troubled me, I realized that I was requiring an impossible purity of Dunbar-Nelson and was obliged to explore the hows of her Democratic Party advocacy. The pamphlet comprises pieces by many Black leaders, including NAACP executive secretary James Weldon Johnson. Contributors emphasize the GOP presumption that African Americans would always vote as a group for that party, despite Republicans' support of white supremacy, and urge African Americans to vote for Democratic presidential nominee John W. Davis. "A Call...