which would have made her a close relative of R.J.Reynolds and J.Sargent Reynolds.
Soon after Anne was born,her family left their Henry County farm for Martinsville,where her daddy opened a saloon.When Joel's fervor for financial security clashed with Sarah's investment in morality,they separated.In 1886,Sarah took Anne with her to Bramwell,West Virginia,
she was unable to care for her.First,she placed Anne in the foster care of William Dixie and his wife,a prominent African-American couple in
Bramwell.Then in 1893,wanting a better education for Ann,Sarah enrolled the eleven-year-old in the Virginia Theological Seminary and College(now Virginia University of Lynchburg).
Anne left Bramwell barely literate,when she graduated from the Virginia Theological Seminary six years later Anne was valediction of her class.While in school,Anne met Edward Spencer,a fellow student who would become Lynchburgh's first parcel postman.They married in 1901 and the couple went to have three children:Bethel,Alroy,and Chauncey Spencer(Later Chauncey would help to initiate the training program that produced the Tuskegee Airmen.)
Anne taught at her Alma mater from 1910 until 1912,while there she met and tutored Ota Benga,a pygmy who had been brought from Belgian Congo who had been placed on exhibit at the 1904 Saint Louis World's Fair and the Bronx Zoo for several years before being sent to Lynchburg
In 1924,Anne was hired by the Jones Memorial Library's board of trustees to work at the Dunbar High School Library.Dunbar Lynchburg's African-American high school and its library the only branch open to
African Americans in the city.Between these two jobs,she spent much of
her time writing and serving on committees to improve the legal,social,
and economic aspects of African American lives.During this time Anne,
also helped to establish the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP and led a campaign to hire African American teachers in African American schools.
Anne's work with the NAACP brought James Weldon Johnson to town and launched Anne's literary career.James was the Renaissance man of Harlem-a poet,diplomat,journalist,anthropologist,teacher,lawyer,and songwriter-songwriter and he came to Lynchburg in 1919 in his capacity as a field agent for the NAACP.During his visit,he befriended Anne and encouraged her to publish her work.Anne was as prolific a writer as she was reticent about publishing.Her often idiosyncratic poems were,even to James,"perhaps too unconventional," and when Henry Louis Mecken offered to help her publish them she turned him down.His criticism,coming as it did from a non-poet,was unwelcome.
James,apparently,had a lighter touch,and Anne was published by such
Harlem Renaissance publications as the Crisis,a journal founded by the NAACP,and the Lyric,a magazine for traditional poetry.
The relationship between Anne's race,her politics,and her poetry is complex.Although a civil rights activist,she opposed school integrations
as "tokenism," and she did not address the issues of African Americans in her poetry nearly as often as did other Harlem Renaissance artists.Anne once declared that "practically none of her artistry than of
her race.She explained her range of subject matter to J.Lee Greene,saying,"I write about some of the things I love.But no civilized articulation for the things I hate."
In "White Things" (1923),one og her best known expections to James's
claim,Anne explored "whitness" and how its supremacy is maintained
only through the violent destruction of all things colored.Anne explained that she wrote the poem in response to a lynching she had read about-perhaps the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner in Valdosta,Georgia-in which a pregnant woman and her unborn baby child were murdered.The poem opens with the observation that "most things are colorful things-the sky,earth,and sea./Black men are most men;but the white are free!"
Several lines later,the white "wand of power" has reduced the hills "of red and darkened pine" to blanched wastelands and has turned the "bloodin a rubyrose/To a poor white poppy-flower." The poem's final verses turn from the transformative devastation that whites inflict upon
the "natural" world to the violent "whiteing of blacks through their transmutation to ash and bone in the act of lynching:
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...
Critic Keith Clark,in his essay on Anne Spencer in Notable Black American Women,"White Things"has come to be seen as "the quintessential 'protest' poem." but given the graphic description and subject matter,Anne's editors at The Crisis found it unnerving and asked
for revisions.Typically,she refused.
At other times,Anne eschewed politics for primroses.Life-Long Poor Browning" is at once a formally structured tributed to her fsvorite poet,
Elizabeth Barett Browning,and a mystic retreat into the natural world.
Echoing Elizabeth formality and constraint,she constracts the precision
of English gardens-" Primoses,prim indeed,in quite ordered hedges..."to
the riotious beauty of Anne's work familiar Blue Ridge Mountains:
Here canopied reaches of dogwood
Beech tree and redbud fine-laced in vines,
Fleet clapping rills by lush ferm and basil,
Drain blue hills to lowlands scented with pines...
According to Anne's biographer,J.Lee Greene,she wrote constantly,"on
paper bags,in the margins and fly leaves of books,on envelopes, on tablets,on the telephone bill,on the back of a check."Dear Langston," addressed to her friend and frequent correspondent Langston Hughes,
appeared as a notion among Anne's papers.The poem seems to express
frustration at her perceived inability to complete anything.In the early 1970s,Anne admitted to J.Lee that she had a reputation for never answering letters,but she explained her self by saying,"i answered every letter I ever received,through at times-too many times-that answer did not get on paper or in the mail."
Anne's fame increased over the years,but not only because of her poetry.She called cottage in her large garden Edankraal,which combined her and her husband Edward's last name with the idea of sacred places such as biblical Eden and and the African (an African term for a native southern African village community).As early as the 1920s,the Spencers turned Edankrral into an artists' saloon,hosting William Edward Du Bois,Paul Robeson,Langston Hughes,and Gwendolyn Brooks,among others.While Jim Grow lawa prevented these Harlem Renaissance luminaries from staying in Lynchburg's hotels,they could find hospitality and intellectual stimulation with the Spencers.In this way,Ann cemented her influence on Harlem-all the way from Virginia.
Anne died of cancer in Lynchburg.Her house and garden at 1313 Pierce
Street are maintained and open for tours.The Anne Spencer house became incorporated shortly after the house was designated as a Virginia Historic Landmark in the autumn of 1976.
Anne taught at her Alma mater from 1910 until 1912,while there she met and tutored Ota Benga,a pygmy who had been brought from Belgian Congo who had been placed on exhibit at the 1904 Saint Louis World's Fair and the Bronx Zoo for several years before being sent to Lynchburg
In 1924,Anne was hired by the Jones Memorial Library's board of trustees to work at the Dunbar High School Library.Dunbar Lynchburg's African-American high school and its library the only branch open to
African Americans in the city.Between these two jobs,she spent much of
her time writing and serving on committees to improve the legal,social,
and economic aspects of African American lives.During this time Anne,
also helped to establish the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP and led a campaign to hire African American teachers in African American schools.
Anne's work with the NAACP brought James Weldon Johnson to town and launched Anne's literary career.James was the Renaissance man of Harlem-a poet,diplomat,journalist,anthropologist,teacher,lawyer,and songwriter-songwriter and he came to Lynchburg in 1919 in his capacity as a field agent for the NAACP.During his visit,he befriended Anne and encouraged her to publish her work.Anne was as prolific a writer as she was reticent about publishing.Her often idiosyncratic poems were,even to James,"perhaps too unconventional," and when Henry Louis Mecken offered to help her publish them she turned him down.His criticism,coming as it did from a non-poet,was unwelcome.
James,apparently,had a lighter touch,and Anne was published by such
Harlem Renaissance publications as the Crisis,a journal founded by the NAACP,and the Lyric,a magazine for traditional poetry.
The relationship between Anne's race,her politics,and her poetry is complex.Although a civil rights activist,she opposed school integrations
as "tokenism," and she did not address the issues of African Americans in her poetry nearly as often as did other Harlem Renaissance artists.Anne once declared that "practically none of her artistry than of
her race.She explained her range of subject matter to J.Lee Greene,saying,"I write about some of the things I love.But no civilized articulation for the things I hate."
In "White Things" (1923),one og her best known expections to James's
claim,Anne explored "whitness" and how its supremacy is maintained
only through the violent destruction of all things colored.Anne explained that she wrote the poem in response to a lynching she had read about-perhaps the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner in Valdosta,Georgia-in which a pregnant woman and her unborn baby child were murdered.The poem opens with the observation that "most things are colorful things-the sky,earth,and sea./Black men are most men;but the white are free!"
Several lines later,the white "wand of power" has reduced the hills "of red and darkened pine" to blanched wastelands and has turned the "bloodin a rubyrose/To a poor white poppy-flower." The poem's final verses turn from the transformative devastation that whites inflict upon
the "natural" world to the violent "whiteing of blacks through their transmutation to ash and bone in the act of lynching:
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...
Critic Keith Clark,in his essay on Anne Spencer in Notable Black American Women,"White Things"has come to be seen as "the quintessential 'protest' poem." but given the graphic description and subject matter,Anne's editors at The Crisis found it unnerving and asked
for revisions.Typically,she refused.
At other times,Anne eschewed politics for primroses.Life-Long Poor Browning" is at once a formally structured tributed to her fsvorite poet,
Elizabeth Barett Browning,and a mystic retreat into the natural world.
Echoing Elizabeth formality and constraint,she constracts the precision
of English gardens-" Primoses,prim indeed,in quite ordered hedges..."to
the riotious beauty of Anne's work familiar Blue Ridge Mountains:
Here canopied reaches of dogwood
Beech tree and redbud fine-laced in vines,
Fleet clapping rills by lush ferm and basil,
Drain blue hills to lowlands scented with pines...
According to Anne's biographer,J.Lee Greene,she wrote constantly,"on
paper bags,in the margins and fly leaves of books,on envelopes, on tablets,on the telephone bill,on the back of a check."Dear Langston," addressed to her friend and frequent correspondent Langston Hughes,
appeared as a notion among Anne's papers.The poem seems to express
frustration at her perceived inability to complete anything.In the early 1970s,Anne admitted to J.Lee that she had a reputation for never answering letters,but she explained her self by saying,"i answered every letter I ever received,through at times-too many times-that answer did not get on paper or in the mail."
Anne's fame increased over the years,but not only because of her poetry.She called cottage in her large garden Edankraal,which combined her and her husband Edward's last name with the idea of sacred places such as biblical Eden and and the African (an African term for a native southern African village community).As early as the 1920s,the Spencers turned Edankrral into an artists' saloon,hosting William Edward Du Bois,Paul Robeson,Langston Hughes,and Gwendolyn Brooks,among others.While Jim Grow lawa prevented these Harlem Renaissance luminaries from staying in Lynchburg's hotels,they could find hospitality and intellectual stimulation with the Spencers.In this way,Ann cemented her influence on Harlem-all the way from Virginia.
Anne died of cancer in Lynchburg.Her house and garden at 1313 Pierce
Street are maintained and open for tours.The Anne Spencer house became incorporated shortly after the house was designated as a Virginia Historic Landmark in the autumn of 1976.
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