Alice (Ruth Moore) Dunbar Nelson was born in New Orleans on July 19, 1875, to Patricia Write and Joseph Moore, who were members of the Creole community. After graduating from college, she worked as a public school teacher and began her career as a writer, publishing poetry and short stories in newspapers and magazines.  She later moved to the Northeast and eventually took a job teaching at Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware.  

Dunbar Nelson served as president of the Wilmington Suffrage Club and was a member of the Delaware Republican State Committee. In the 1910s, the Congressional Union of the National American Woman Suffrage Association recruited her as an organizer. She toured throughout Pennsylvania and Delaware, speaking alongside well-known suffragists like Mary Church Terrell. In addition to advocating for women’s right to vote, Dunbar Nelson also called attention to issues that affected the Black community, such as overcrowded housing, domestic violence, segregation, and racialized violence. She was very active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  

In 1898, Dunbar Nelson married Paul Laurence Dunbar, a prominent Black poet. This marriage ended in separation four years later due to Dunbar’s alcoholism and physical abuse. She had a number of sexual relationships with both men and women throughout her life. One of her most significant queer relationships was with Edwina B. Kruse, who served as the principal at the high school where Dunbar Nelson worked in Wilmington, Delaware. Dunbar Nelson eventually married two more times, but these marriages did not hinder her romantic interest in and pursuit of women. She wrote details about these relationships in her diary, revealing a thriving lesbian and bisexual subculture among Black clubwomen in the 1920s and 1930s. She passed away on September 18, 1935, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

For more on Dunbar Nelson see Gloria T. Hull, Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (New York: Norton, 1984); Wendy Rouse, Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Suffrage Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2022). For an OutHistory exhibit that addresses Dunbar Nelson, see The Queer History of Women's Suffrage: Scholarship and Censorship in 2025, by Wendy Rouse.