BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : AFRICAN AMERICAN " ETHEL RAY NANCE " A QUIET HEROINE WHO FOUGHT INCESSANTLY FOR RACIAL JUSTICE : GOES INTO THE " HALL OF BLACK GENIUS "

BLACK                  SOCIAL               HISTORY                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Ethel Ray Nance -- a quiet heroine who fought incessantly for racial justice

Heather Elizabeth Bend, Colby College

Date of Award

Spring 1997

Document Type

Senior Scholars Paper

Department

Colby College. History Dept.

Abstract

The great use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it! --William James Ethel Ray Nance, midwife of the Harlem Renaissance, forerunner in the movement to preserve African American history and soldier for Civil Rights, used her life well. 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. My Senior Scholars' paper is about Ethel Ray Nance's life. The writing of this biography has been an act of recovery: the recovery of a life that teaches about joy, pain, happiness, struggle, and the necessity of believing in oneself and fighting for what one knows in one's soul to be true and good. It is not a biography of a famous woman, but it is a biography of an influential woman.