Anne Spencer | |
|---|---|
 Anne Bethel Spencer in her wedding dress, 1900 | |
| Born | Annie Bethel Bannister February 6, 1882 Henry County, Virginia |
| Died | July 27, 1975 (aged 93) Lynchburg, Virginia |
| Alma mater | Virginia Seminary |
| Genre | poetry |
| Literary movement | Harlem Renaissance |
Anne Bethel Spencer (born Bannister; February 6, 1882 – July 27, 1975) was an American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. She was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, despite living in Virginia for most of her life, far from the center of the movement in New York. She met Edward Spencer while attending Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Following their marriage in 1901, the couple moved into a house he built at 1313 Pierce Street, where they raised a family and lived for the remainder of their lives.[1]
Spencer is a widely anthologized poet, and was the first Virginian and one of three African American women included in the highly influential Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). As a civil rights activist for equality and educational opportunities, she and her husband Edward, with close friend Mary Rice Hayes Allen and others, revived the chapter of the NAACP in Lynchburg, Virginia, which had begun in 1913. In association with James Weldon Johnson, the branch became fully active with ninety-six members as of July, 1918.[2] The Spencers' home became an important center and intellectual salon for guests and dignitaries such as Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Anne Spencer also loved her garden and her cottage, Edankraal, which her husband Edward built for her as a writing studio in the garden behind their home. The name Edankraal combines Edward, Anne, and kraal, the Afrikaans word for enclosure or corral.
- ^ "The House". The Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum. Archived from the original on 2020-11-30. Retrieved 2024-05-13.
- ^ McCray, Carrie Allen (1998). Freedom's child : the life of a Confederate general's Black daughter. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books. pp. 123–29. ISBN 1565121864.