Religion, Race, and Gender in the 'Race-less' Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Abstract

Religion, Race, and Gender in the 'Race-less' Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1875, Alice Ruth Moore was the product of New Orleans Creole society and a post-Reconstruction South that reinstituted a polarized racial divide.Black by American constructs of race, Alice Ruth Moore belonged to that society of fairskinned blacks who could and often did pass as white.Though sometimes straddling the color line, this predominantly educated, elite society of blacks proved a significant presence in black activism and arts.While most of these turn-of-the-century black activists did not experience the depth of poverty and discrimination suffered by the larger population of blacks, they were nevertheless committed to black uplift.Alice Ruth Moore was one among this society, and for much of her adult life she directed her efforts to black intellectual activism.She was one among many black leaders energized by the belief that blacks would come to know prosperity and progress through education, and that through print media their struggles, sufferings and achievements could be given voice, even in the wake of the South's Jim Crow society.While the close of the nineteenth century marked a return to the Old South, that is, white rule and black subjugation, blacks nevertheless made strides in education and, despite the terror and apartheid of the Jim Crow South, black activism persisted.The nineteenth century closed with the promises of post-war Reconstruction a worn and faded dream: blacks found themselves again relegated to second-class status.While they were no longer enslaved, blacks were installed again as the main labor source for the agricultural south, and they were remanded to a system that left them economic, political and social

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