By William “Skip” Deegans
The poet Anne Spencer was born on a Virginia farm circa 1880. Her mother was Sarah Louise Scales Bannister, and her father who had been a slave was Joel Cephus Bannister. Her parents separated, and Spencer and her mother moved to Bramwell, West Virginia, where they boarded with William T. Dixie and his family. Dixie owned a barber shop and was a prominent African American in the community. Spencer’s mother took a job as a cook.
Spencer’s mother was not enamored with the school in Bramwell, and Anne never attended school until she was eleven years old at which time she was sent to Virginia Seminary, a Baptist school for African-Americans in Lynchburg. She graduated valedictorian at seventeen and returned to Bramwell where she again boarded with the Dixie family and taught school in local mining camps.
After teaching for two years, she married Edward Spencer, a classmate at Virginia Seminary, and settled in Lynchburg. For 20 years, Spencer was a librarian at the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, and her husband became the first African-American postman in Lynchburg. In 1918, Spencer and the writer, James Weldon Johnson, organized the first NAACP chapter in Lynchburg. With Johnson’s help and encouragement, Spencer’s first published poem, “Before The Feast Of Shushan,” appeared in the NAACP’s Crisis newspaper.
Because African-Americans could not stay in Lynchburg hotels or inns, the Spencer home became a guest house for such notables as W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, George Washington Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thurgood Marshall, all of whom encouraged Spencer to write. Spencer continued, penning over 2,000 poems. She became the first African-American woman poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. She died in Lynchburg in 1975 and was honored in 2020 by the U.S. Post Office to be included in a series of forever stamps (pictured) of the Harlem Renaissance.
Spencer’s home and garden are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and are open to the public.