Spencer, Anne (1882–1975)

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Spencer, Anne (1882–1975)

African-American poet who was a founding member of the Harlem Renaissance. Name variations: when her mother resumed her maiden name, Anne was known as Annie Bethel Scales. Born Anne Bethel Bannister in Henry County, Virginia, on February 6, 1882; died on July 27, 1975, at age 93; daughter of freed slaves Joel Cephus Bannister and Sarah Louise(Scales) Bannister; graduated from the Virginia Seminary, 1899; married Edward Spencer, on May 15, 1901; children: two boys and a girl.

A founding member of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Anne Spencer was born in 1882 in Henry County, Virginia, the daughter of former slaves Joel Cephus Bannister and Sarah Louise Scales . She was brought up in the home of a barber, where her mother, who had separated from her husband, had placed her for her betterment. Sarah also made sure Anne attended the Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, giving her an opportunity to mingle with affluent blacks. Anne Spencer proved an apt student and gave the 1899 valedictory at her graduation.

Two years later, she married fellow classmate Edward Spencer and the couple settled down in Lynchburg. Beginning with "Before the Feast at Shushan," the majority of Spencer's poems were published in the 1920s and appeared in major anthologies. Strongly influenced by Olive Schreiner , her poetry deals more with gender than with race.

The Spencer home became a salon for African-American artists, including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay. Anne's garden, along with her lively mind, sparked much of the pilgrimage. The well-tended garden of flowers, which became the "soul" of her poems, is now a historical landmark. "God never planted a garden," she wrote. "But he placed a keeper there."

A civil-rights activist and feminist, Spencer helped found Lynchburg's first NAACP chapter, started a suffrage club, refused to ride segregated public transportation, and was the librarian at Dunbar High School for over 20 years so that black children would be exposed to books otherwise unavailable. Anne Spencer retired from the public eye in 1938, and became a recluse after the death of her husband in 1964. Illness caused the end of her reading and writing; it also caused her absence at the Virginia Seminary and College when they awarded her an honorary degree in 1975.