Anne Spencer

On her wedding day in 1901.

Anne Spencer (1882-1975) was a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. She lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, 671.3 km from Harlem, but her house and garden became a sort of retreat for its great and good. She was friends with Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sterling Brown and, especially, James Weldon Johnson (he who wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing”). Maya Angelou, Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King, Jr, etc, also knew her.

Ota Benga: Attentive readers of this blog will remember her as the one who taught English to Ota Benga after he was rescued from the Bronx Zoo. He had been put on display there with an orangutan.

Her garden started as a vegetable garden to feed her family. Then she planted flowers and bushes and in time her garden took over the whole backyard (pictured). Her husband Edward built a garden house called Edankraal. There she wrote poetry. A room of one’s own.

Her poems she wrote for herself. When she got an idea she would write on any available surface, even the wall. Only about 30 of her poems were published in her lifetime – not enough for a book, but enough to be anthologized. She was one of the three Black women to appear in the “Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry” (1973).

Edankraal, where she wrote.

She especially liked to write about nature and love. That set her apart from the Black protest literature of the time. It was not that she did not care:

“I write about the things that I love, but I have no civilized articulation for the things that I hate.”

circa 1923

NAACP: In fact, she was a co-founder the Lynchburg branch of the NAACP. That is how she met James Weldon Johnson – and how her poetry got noticed by him and therefore others back in Harlem. He got her first poem printed in 1920 in Crisis, the NAACP magazine, then edited by Du Bois. When Alain Locke put one of her poems in “The New Negro” (1925), her place in the Harlem Renaissance was assured.

Librarian: She also founded the first public library in Lynchburg that Black people were allowed to go to, becoming Lynchburg’s first Black librarian. She even added her own books. She was a librarian from 1924 to 1945.

She also led protests to make sure that the Black high school in Lynchburg hired Black teachers.

Part of what made her home a haven for Black intellectuals is that the hotels of Jim Crow Virginia turned them away. What first drew Du Bois to her house is that she had a bathtub instead of a tin tub, one of the few Black households in Lynchburg that did. But even better than a bathtub, he found that she was his intellectual equal, someone he could have long conversations with.

Her house and garden are still there, at 1313 Pierce Street, now a museum with a historical plaque out front.

Her papers, including letters and unpublished writings, like “Chattel Slavery or Why I Dislike Booker T”, are in boxes at the University of Virginia.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: mainly Google Images and “Anne Spencer” (2015) by Brucella Jordan.

See also:

• Harlem Renaissance
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Nella Larsen
  • Arthur Schomburg
• Jim Crow
• Ota Benga
• Lift Every Voice and Sing
• Virginia Woolf:  Room of One’s Own
• W.E.B. Du Bois
• Booker T. Washington

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