Anne Spencer

Annie Bethel Bannister was born on the sixth of February 1882 on a farm in Henry County, Virginia, the daughter of Joel Cephus Bannister — a formerly enslaved man who kept a saloon in nearby Martinsville — and Sarah Louise Scales. When her parents separated, her mother took her maiden name and carried the child to Bramwell, West Virginia, where Annie boarded with the family of a cousin, a barber, while Sarah worked as a cook. That West Virginia childhood, and later her formal schooling at the Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, laid the foundation for the life to follow.

In Lynchburg she married Edward Spencer and built a home and a garden that became a gathering place. Though fewer than thirty of her poems appeared in print during her lifetime, she stood among the principal voices of the Harlem Renaissance — the movement's foremost poet resident in Virginia. Her verse, spare and exact, turned upon biblical and mythological themes and upon the quiet defiance of a Black woman's dignity.

It was James Weldon Johnson, a guest in her house, who discovered her work and arranged for "Before the Feast at Shushan" to appear in The Crisis in 1920, when she was already forty. Johnson praised her "economy of phrase and compression of thought." Her Lynchburg home drew Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and many others who could find no welcome in segregated hotels.

From 1923 to 1945 she served as founding librarian of the Dunbar High School library, supplementing its shelves from her own collection, and she labored for civil rights in her city. In 1973 she became one of the few African American poets gathered into the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Her garden and home in Lynchburg endure as a museum. Honored be Anne Spencer, whose few and perfect words still bloom.