Poet Anne Spencer was born Annie Bethel Bannister on a plantation in Henry County, Virginia, February 6, 1882. In 1886, her mother left her father, and she and young Anne moved to West Virginia and settled in Bramwell. Annie lodged in the home of the Dixie family while her mother worked as a cook at a local inn. William T. Dixie and his family were prominent members of the Black community. Without the formal structure of education, Annie had an unusual amount of freedom for an African American child in the late 19th and early 20th century. Her childhood in Bramwell was to prove foundational to her development as a poet and an intellectual. She had no formal education before the age of eleven.
Annie was sent to Lynchburg to be enrolled in the Virginia University of Lynchburg (then known as Virginia Seminary) in 1893. Annie excelled at the seminary and graduated from the Virginia Theological Seminary and College six years later as its valedictorian. Anne concluded her studies in 1899, the year in which she met and married Charles Edward Spencer in 1901. Between 1899 and 1901, she taught school in the McDowell County coal towns of Maybeury and Elkhorn. In 1903, the Spencers moved permanently to Lynchburg where they raised three children together. Anne Spencer’s literary life began while she was a student at the Virginia Seminary, now known as Virginia University of Lynchburg, where she wrote her first poem, “The Skeptic.”
Spencer’s poems spoke to race, nature, and the harsh realities of the world that she lived in. 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. In 1920, when she was forty years old, through Johnson’s own editor, Anne had her first poem, “Before the Feast at Shushan,” published. It appeared in the February 1920 issue of “The Crisis,” the official publication of the NAACP.
Spencer’s poetry was published in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including the “Opportunity”, and “Survey Graphic”, Palms, and all the major anthologies of her day: Robert Kerlin’s Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), Charles S. Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz (1927), and Countée Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927). Known for her nature poetry and feminist themes, Spencer was one of the few women poets to be included in anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance after it was over.
As a civil rights activist for equality and educational opportunities, she and her husband Edward, worked with close friend Mary Rice Hayes Allen and James Weldon Johnson. They revived the chapter of the NAACP in Lynchburg, Virginia, which had begun in 1913. The Lynchburg, VA. branch became fully active with ninety-six members as of July, 1918. Although Spencer never moved from Lynchburg, their 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., W.E.B Du Bois, and Paul Robeson, to visit when traveling in the South.
Anne Spencer also loved her garden and a cottage, Edankraal, which her husband Edward built for her as a writing studio in the garden behind their home. The name “Edankraal” combines Edward and Anne and kraal, the Afrikaans word for enclosure or corral. The majority of Spencer’s work was published during the 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance. 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. For instance, critics interpret her poem “White Things” to be a comparison of the subjugation of the Black race to the despoliation of nature.
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. In addition, her poems were included in “The Book of American Negro Poetry”, which was edited by, James Weldon Johnson. The Harlem Renaissance allowed her to come into contact with numerous intellectuals and artists, who appreciated her poetic talent and who suggested that she sign her works as Anne Spencer. 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 Black to be featured in this work.
Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea.
Black men are most men; but the white are free!
White things are rare things; so rare, so rare
They stole from out a silvered world—somewhere.
Finding earth-plains fair plains, save greenly grassed,
They strewed white feathers of cowardice, as they passed;
The golden stars with lances fine
The hills all red and darkened pine,
They blanched with their wand of power;
And turned the blood in a ruby rose
To a poor white poppy-flower.
They pyred a race of black, black men,
And burned them to ashes white; then
Laughing, a young one claimed a skull.
For the skull of a black is white, not dull,
But a glistening awful thing;
Made it seems, for this ghoul to swing
In the face of God with all his might,
And swear by the hell that siréd him:
“Man-maker, make white!”
-Anne Spencer