Minnesota's Renaissance Women

Duluth and Minnesota Women's History
 


Born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1899, Ethel Ray Nance spent her childhood in an overwhelmingly white community. The daughter of Inga Nordquist Ray, a Swedish immigrant, and William Henry Ray, an African American from North Carolina, Ethel Ray learned at an early age that the color of a person's skin was a determining factor in the treatment he/she received. Ethel Ray Nance had a vision of a world in which "we respond to people not color". She dedicated her life to this vision, spending over seventy years fighting against racism, discrimination and the ill treatment of human beings.

Correspondence:
WEB DuBois correspondence: http://oubliette.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b045-i348/#page/1/mode/1up
Ethel Ray Nance's Letters: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/give/bene56/duboisletters.html
Newspaper Articles:
A Patron of the Arts: Ethel Ray in Harlem: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/nyregion/literary-new-york-hurston-s-new-york-her-eyes-were-watching-harlem.html 
Remembering Countee Cullen: http://harlemrenaissancelibrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-harlem-renaissance-friends-biography.html
Oral History
An excerpt from Ethel Ray Nance's oral history: (regarding the lynching in Duluth)
http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/html/oraltext_nance.htm

Women in the Harlem Renaissance
http://aawomeninhr.blogspot.com/