<p>Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, Alice Dunbar Nelson was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. As her posthumous editor Alice T. Hull puts it, Dunbar-Nelson and her contemporaries were "always mindful of their need to be living refutations of the sexual slurs to which black women were subjected and, at the same time, as much as white women, w...