The 'Steenth Street Stories
by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Inspired by her experience teaching Black kindergarteners in New York City from 1897–98 at the White Rose Mission, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote twelve short stories about children living
in a poor urban neighborhood.
A settlement house founded by her friend and sister activist Victoria Earle Matthews — whose mother freed herself from enslavement shortly after she was born — the White Rose Mission’s goal was to provide services to African American women and girls who left the South hoping to escape poverty and racial violence. Upon arriving in New York, many of these women and girls only found more of the same. African Americans were often denied good jobs and forced to live in substandard housing. Women with children faced special challenges. Most supported their families by making or washing clothes, cleaning houses, or serving food in restaurants. During this time, African Americans were more likely to die — as adults or as babies — than any other group in New York.
To translate her experience teaching at the Mission into works of fiction, Dunbar-Nelson imagined a community center called the Pure in Heart Mission. She located this fictionalized community hub in a neighborhood she called ’Steenth Street. Her stories tell of funny, moving, and tragic moments in the lives of the children, their parents, and the middle-class reformers who come into the neighborhood to offer help.
Dunbar-Nelson intended to publish the stories together in a collection titled “The ’Steenth Street Stories.” She even wrote a table of contents for the book. But the book never came out. Instead, she published eight of the stories separately in newspapers and magazines, mostly in 1900 and 1901. More than fifty years after Dunbar-Nelson’s death, literature scholar Akasha (Gloria) T. Hull included five of the stories in her important 1988 collection of Dunbar-Nelson’s work. However, like so many Black women writers, Dunbar-Nelson’s work has remained under-acknowledged through the present day.
Dedicated to bringing Dunbar-Nelson’s extraordinary unpublished short story collection to new readers in the 21st century, Taught by Literature is producing an accessible digital edition of The Annals of ’Steenth Street alongside resources adaptable to K–12 school curricula.
Beginning with “His Heart’s Desire,” a short story about a boy who wants a doll, our team will be bringing these short stories to life one by one to form a complete edition of the collection Dunbar-Nelson originally envisioned.