Queer Places:
1313 Pierce St, Lynchburg, VA 24501
Forest Hill Burial Park
Lynchburg, Lynchburg City, Virginia, USA
Anne
Bethel Spencer (born Bannister; February 6, 1882 – July 27, 1975) was an
American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener.
While a librarian at the all-black Dunbar High School, a position she held
for 20 years, she supplemented the original three books by bringing others
from her own collection at home. Though she lived outside New York City,
the recognized center of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New
Negro Movement, she was an important member of this group of
intellectuals. Following her marriage to Edward Spencer in 1901, the
couple moved to Lynchburg, Virginia where they raised a family and lived
for the remainder of their lives.
As a poet, Spencer holds an important place as the first Virginian and
first African American to have her poetry included in the highly influential
Norton Anthology of American Poetry. As a civil rights activist for
equality and educational opportunities, she and her husband Edward worked in
association with James Weldon Johnson to develop a chapter of the NAACP in
Lynchburg, Virginia, where their home became an important center and
intellectual salon for Spencer's guests and dignitaries such as
Langston
Hughes, Marian Anderson,
George Washington Carver, Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
James Weldon Johnson, and
W. E. B.
Du Bois. Anne Spencer also loved her garden and a cottage, Edankraal,
which her husband Edward built for her in the garden behind their home. The
name Edankraal combines Edward and Anne and kraal, the
Afrikaans word for enclosure or corral.
Annie Bethel Bannister was born in Henry County, Virginia, to Joel Cephus
Bannister and Sarah Louise Scales, African Americans who were determined to
make a better life for their daughter. Her parents worked on a plantation
after their marriage. Both parents, although her father Joel was born a slave
in 1862, were part of the first generation of African Americans whose
childhood followed the demise of slavery.
As an only child, she was the center of her parents' affections. This
devotion led to their separation over differences in ideas about child
rearing. After the separation, Annie Bannister was then known as Annie Scales,
taking her mother's maiden name. Mother and daughter moved to West Virginia
and settled in Bramwell, a town whose acceptance of African Americans and
immigrants was unusual for the time. Annie lodged in the home of the Dixie
family while her mother worked as a cook at a local inn. William T. Dixie, a
proprietor of his own barber shop, his wife, Willie Belle, and their five
children, were prominent members of the African American community.[1]
As a lodger in the Dixie household, Annie was without cares, chores, or
schooling of any kind, even though she grew up with the Dixie children who
attended school locally and routinely performed household chores. Sarah was
deeply devoted to her daughter and she believed the local schools were
unsuitable for her. Without the formal structure of education, Annie had an
unusual amount of freedom for an African American child in the late
nineteenth/early twentieth century. It was this freedom of life without care
in Bramwell that would lead to her development as a poet, through her
explorations of the natural world and her reliance on the solitude she found
in the only private place available to her, the family outhouse. It was there
in the outhouse, that Annie, as an illiterate child, would take the Sears and
Roebuck catalog and seclude herself, turning the pages, imagining and dreaming
herself as a reader.[2]
Her childhood in Bramwell was to prove foundational to her development as a
poet and an intellectual. The solitude she found in the Dixie's outhouse was
to resurface for her as an adult in Lynchburg, with the garden house her
husband built for her, called Edankraal, a name derived from the combination
of their names, "Edward" and "Anne," and the Africaans word for enclosure or
corral, "kraal."[3]
Although separated, Annie's parents, Joel and Sarah, continued contact
concerning their daughter's well being. When Joel learned that Annie was not
in school he sent Sarah an ultimatum that Annie must attend school or he would
take her back to live with him. Although Sarah believed the local schools were
unsuitable for Annie, she had learned of the Virginia Seminary at a church
meeting. With Joel's ultimatum in mind, Annie was sent to Lynchburg to be
enrolled in the Virginia University of Lynchburg (then known as Virginia
Seminary) in 1893 when she was 11 years old.[4]
Despite her largely illiterate childhood, Annie excelled at the seminary,
delivering the valedictory address at her graduation in 1899.[4]
Annie would return to Bramwell during breaks and over the summer. Having
received a Normal School education at the Virginia Seminary, Annie returned to
Bramwell after graduation and taught school in Elkhorn and Maybeury, West
Virginia from 1899 - 1901.[5]
While at the Virginia Seminary Annie met fellow student Charles Edward
Spencer, whom she married on May 15, 1901 at the Dixie's home in Bramwell. In
1903, the Spencers moved permanently to Lynchburg and built a home at 1313
Pierce Street where they raised three children together, two daughters, Bethel
and Alroy, and a son, Chauncey Spencer. Chauncey was to continue his mother's
legacy of activism, playing a prominent role in military service during World
War II. Chauncey's actions and determination led to the formation of the
Tuskegee Airmen. Chauncey Spencer was to become a noted member of that group
at a time when African American pilots had been refused military service as
pilots.[6]
Soon after her husband's death,
Georgia Douglas Johnson began to host what became 40 years
of weekly "Saturday Salons" for friends and authors, including Langston
Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer,
Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset,
Angelina Weld Grimké and Eulalie Spence — all major contributors to the
New Negro Movement, which is better known today as the Harlem Renaissance.
Before Anne started her life as a writer, she worked at an all-black local
high school known as the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. At the school, she
worked as a librarian for more than 20 years from 1943-1945.[7]The
library consisted of a rather small collection of books, which resulted in
Spencer bringing books from her own collection at home to add to the library.[3]
Anne Spencer's literary life began while she was a student at the Virginia
Seminary where she wrote her first poem, "the Skeptic," now lost. She
continued to write poetry throughout her life, using any scrap of paper or
garden catalogue page that was handy, to record her thoughts. Spencer's poems
spoke to race, nature, and the harsh realities of the world that she lived in.[8]
Her work would go on to be widely anthologized. Spencer's career as a poet
began in 1919, when she was planning to open a chapter of the NAACP in
Lynchburg. Anne Spencer hosted James Weldon Johnson in her home, as a
traveling representative for the NAACP. It was during this visit in 1919 that
Johnson discovered Anne's poetry, and working through H.L. Mencken, Johnson's
own editor, Anne had her first poem, "Before the Feast at Shushan," published
in the February 1920 issue of The Crisis. She was 40 years old at the time her
first poem was published.
The majority of Spencer's work was published during the 1920s, during the
Harlem Renaissance.[9]
Her work was highly respected during her time, and through her poems, she was
able to touch on topics of race and nature, as well as themes of feminism.[10]
For instance, critics interpret her poem "White Things" to be a comparison of
the subjugation of the black race to the despoliation of nature.[11]
Her work was notably featured in Alain Locke's famous anthology The New
Negro: An Interpretation, which connected her to the lifeline of the
Harlem Renaissance, despite the fact that she lived in Virginia, far from New
York.[12]
In addition, her poems were included in The Book of American Negro Poetry,
which was edited by another figure of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon
Johnson.[13]
During her lifetime, Spencer was able to publish over 30 poems. She earned
herself a place in the esteemed Norton Anthology of American Poetry for
her writing, making her the second African American to be featured in this
work.[3]
After her death in 1975, much of her work was published in Time’s Unfading
Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life and Poetry. She was later featured in
Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance.[14]
In the later half of the twentieth century, much of Spencer’s lost work was
found and published by other famous poets.
Anne Spencer died at the age of 93 on July 27, 1975 and is buried alongside
her husband Edward, who died in 1964, in the family plot at Forest Hills
Cemetery in Lynchburg. In 2016, the Library of Virginia and Dominion Power
honored her as one of their Strong Men and Women in Virginia History.[15]
The Lynchburg home in which Anne Spencer lived and worked is now a museum,
the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum. The Anne Spencer House and Garden
Museum is dedicated to preserving her legacy and connection to the Harlem
Renaissance.[16]
A celebrated gardener during her lifetime, Anne's garden was inextricably
woven into her life and provided the inspiration for much of her poetry. A
garden house, the one-room retreat, called Edankraal, where Anne did much of
her writing, is also part of the property. Anne Spencer's papers, related
family papers, and books from her personal library reside at the Albert and
Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. Some
of Anne Spencer's personal correspondence with James Weldon Johnson,
specifically selected by her, are part of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial
Collection at the Beineke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale
University.
Much of her poetry was deeply connected to her garden and she used her
garden and the plants she grew there symbolically in many of her poems, among
them, "Grapes, Still Life." Among her most influential works was "White
Things", though it was not republished in her lifetime after its initial
appearance in The Crisis. Nevertheless, its impact was such that Keith
Clark, in Notable Black American Women, referred to it as "the quintessential
'protest' poem."[17]
Still poetically active up to her death in 1975, Anne Spencer wrote one of her
most evocative poems, titled for that same year, "1975."
IIn 2019, the United States Postal Service announced that Spencer would
featured in a 2020 Forever stamp honoring figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
Others in the quartet include writer
Alain Locke;
novelist Nella
Larsen; and historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.[18]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Spencer