7 7 Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) was born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, Louisiana, and attended both the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University before becoming a well-known writer. At age twenty she published her first book of poetry, Violet and Other Tales (1895). She moved to Brooklyn, where she taught school and gave classes at Victoria Earle Matthews’s White Rose Mission. For several years she was married to poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. After Dunbar’s death in 1906, she married a journalist, Robert John Nelson. Dunbar-Nelson and her husband published the Wilmington Advocate newspaper in the 1920s, and were active in black Republican Party politics. During the Harlem Renaissance, her work received renewed critical attention by a younger generation of African-American writers and poets. Dunbar-Nelson was an insightful political analyst, and was for decades widely read in black publications. With the publication of Dunbar-Nelson’s diary in 1984, the existence of an active African-American lesbian network in the 1920s and her relationships with other women became known to scholars.
It has been six years since the franchise as a national measure has been granted women. The Negro woman has had the ballot in conjunction with her white sister, and friend and foe alike are asking the question, What has she done with it?
Six years is a very short time in which to ask for results from any measure or condition, no matter how simple. In six years a human being is barely able to make itself intelligible to listeners; is a feeble, puny thing at best, with undeveloped understanding, no power of reasoning, with a slight contributory value to the human race, except in a sentimental fashion. Nations in six years are but the beginnings of an idea. It is barely possible to erect a structure of any permanent value in six years, and only the most ephemeral trees have reached any size in six years.
So perhaps it is hardly fair to ask with a cynic’s sneer, What has the Negro woman done with the ballot since she has had it? But, since the question continues to be hurled at the woman, she must needs be nettled into reply.
To those colored women who worked, fought, spoke, sacrificed, traveled, pleaded, wept, cajoled, all but died for the right of suffrage for themselves and their peers, it seemed as if the ballot would be the great objective of life. That with its granting, all the economic, political, and social problems to which the race had been subject would be solved. They did not hesitate to say—those militantly gentle workers for the vote—that with the granting of the ballot the women would step into the dominant place, politically, of the race. That all the mistakes which the men had made would be rectified. The men have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, said the women. Cheap political office and little political preferment had dazzled their eyes so that they could not see the great issues affecting the race. They had been fooled by specious lies, fair promises and large-sounding works. Pre-election promises had inflated their chests, so that they could not see the post-election failures at their feet.
And thus on and on during all the bitter campaign of votes for women.
One of the strange phases of the situation was the rather violent objection of the Negro man to the Negro woman’s having the vote. Just what his objection racially was, he did not say, preferring to hide behind the grandiloquent platitude of his white political boss. He had probably not thought the matter through; if he had, remembering how precious the ballot was to the race, he would have hesitated at withholding its privilege from another one of his own people.
But all that is neither here nor there. The Negro woman got the vote along with some tens of million other women in the country. And has it made any appreciable difference in the status of the race? … The Negro woman was going to be independent, she had averred. She came into the political game with a clean slate. No Civil War memories for her, and no deadening sense of gratitude to influence her vote. She would vote men and measures, not parties. She could scan each candidate’s record and give him her support according to how he had stood in the past on the question of race. She owed no party allegiance. The name of Abraham Lincoln was not synonymous with her for blind G.O.P. allegiance. She would show the Negro man how to make his vote a power, and not a joke. She would break up the tradition that one could tell a black man’s politics by the color of his skin.
And when she got the ballot she slipped quietly, safely, easily, and conservatively into the political party of her male relatives.
Which is to say, that with the exception of New York City, and a sporadic break here and there, she became a Republican. Not a conservative one, however. She was virulent and zealous. Prone to stop speaking to her friends who might disagree with her findings on the political issue, and vituperative in campaigns.
In other words the Negro woman has by and large been a disappointment in her handling of the ballot. She has added to the overhead charges of the political machinery, without solving racial problems.
One of two bright lights in the story hearten the reader. In the congressional campaign of 1922 the Negro woman cut adrift from party allegiance and took up the cudgel (if one may mix metaphors) for the cause of the Dyer Bill. The Anti-Lynching Crusaders, led by Mrs. Mary B. Talbot, found in several states—New Jersey, Delaware, and Michigan particularly—that its cause was involved in the congressional election. Sundry gentlemen had voted against the Dyer Bill in the House and had come up for re-election. They were properly castigated by being kept at home. The women’s votes unquestionably had the deciding influence in the three states mentioned, and the campaign conducted by them was of a most commendable kind.
School bond issues here and there have been decided by the colored woman’s votes—but so slight is the ripple on the smooth surface of conservatism that it has attracted no attention from the deadly monotony of the blind faith in the “Party of Massa Linkun.”
As the younger generation becomes of age it is apt to be independent in thought and in act. But it is soon whipped into line by the elders, and by the promise of plums of preferment or of an amicable position in the community or of easy social relations—for we still persecute socially those who disagree with us politically. What is true of the men is true of the women. The very young is apt to let father, sweetheart, brother, or uncle decide her vote….
Whether women have been influenced and corrupted by their male relatives and friends is a moot question. Were I to judge by my personal experience I would say unquestionably so. I mean a personal experience with some hundreds of women in the North Atlantic, Middle Atlantic, and Middle Western States. High ideals are laughed at, and women confess with drooping wings how they have been scoffed at for working for nothing, for voting for nothing, for supporting a candidate before having first been “seen.” In the face of this sinister influence it is difficult to see how the Negro woman could have been anything else but “just another vote.”
All this is rather a gloomy presentment of a well-known situation. But it is not altogether hopeless. The fact that the Negro woman CAN be roused when something near and dear to her is touched and threatened is cheering. Then she throws off the influence of her male companion and strikes out for herself. Whatever the Negro may hope to gain for himself must be won at the ballot box, and quiet “going along” will never gain his end. When the Negro woman finds that the future of her children lies in her own hands—if she can be made to see this—she will strike off the political shackles she has allowed to be hung upon her, and win the economic freedom of her race.
Perhaps some Joan of Arc will lead the way.
Source: “The Negro Woman and the Ballot,” Messenger 9 (April 1927), p. 111.
Eleanor Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore: A History of Love and Violence among the African American Elite (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
Bruce D. Dickson, Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, An Alice Dunbar-Nelson Reader, ed. R. Ora Williams (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979).
———, The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Vols. 1–3, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Addison Gayle, Jr., Oak and Ivy (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
Gloria T. Hull, ed., Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (New York: Norton, 1984).