The Virginia writer was one example of the Harlem Renaissance’s influence beyond New York.
by Rich Watson
Anne Spencer was a Harlem Renaissance-era poet notable for being one of the first black female poets to make the prestigious Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. She was active in the NAACP, as well as a respected librarian and gardener.
She did all this while living over four hundred miles south of Harlem itself.
The Harlem Renaissance elsewhere
Harlem was the epicenter of the growth of black culture during the twenties, but it wasn’t the only location where it took place.
The south side of Chicago saw a similar surge during the thirties, spearheaded by such notable artists as Richard Wright, Louis Armstrong, Lorraine Hansberry, Katherine Dunham, Earl Hines and many more. Some say it was more radical than its Harlem counterpart.
In Los Angeles, composers such as Bruce Forsythe and Claudius Wilson led a similar cultural movement. The influence of the Renaissance impacted other western cities.
Spencer was born in Henry County, Virginia and attended college in a city called Lynchburg. By 1901 she had married and settled there.
Lynchburg was where her story began in earnest.
About Lynchburg, VA
Merchant and abolitionist John Lynch founded Lynchburg in 1757. Monacan Indian Nation tribes had lived in the area for over ten thousand years. Lynch’s ferry service contributed to the area’s growth. It led to a canal, a towpath and eventually a toll bridge over the James River.
In the 1850s came the railroad known today as the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, which supplied the Confederacy during the Civil War. For four days in 1865, Lynchburg was the capital of Virginia. Following the war, the Richmond and Allegheny Railroad was built along the James.
Manufacturing expanded Lynchburg’s wealth. In 1886, Spencer’s alma mater, the black college known today as the Virginia University of Lynchburg, was founded. Lynchburg factories supported America during World War One and thrived during the 1920s.
Today it’s an independent city of 79,000.
Anne Spencer in Lynchburg
Annie Scales attended VUL, formerly the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, at age eleven—not because she was a prodigy, but because her mother, separated from her father, believed local schools weren’t good enough and her father had threatened to take Annie to live with him. By her graduation in 1899, she would deliver the valedictory address.
While at VUL, Scales wrote her first poem, “The Skeptic.” She also met Edward Spencer, her future husband. He would become Lynchburg’s first black mailman. Two years after their marriage, they moved into a Queen Anne-style house they dubbed Edankraal (Ed-an for Edward and Anne, kraal for the Afrikaans word for enclosure). They had three children. While living there, she cultivated a garden which figured in her poetry.
Anne Spencer would jot down her poetry on scraps of paper and even the walls of her home, more for herself than for an audience. That would soon change.
The Spencers, with former VUL president Mary Hayes Allen, started a local chapter of the NAACP in 1913. This attracted the attention of writer James Weldon Johnson, who would become the organization’s executive secretary in 1920. On a visit to Lynchburg in 1919, he discovered Anne’s poetry and encouraged her to continue writing.
A year later, the NAACP’s newsletter The Crisis published her poem “Before The Feast of Shushan.” Her career as a poet took off from there. When she appeared in the 1922 anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by Johnson, and the anthology The New Negro, three years later, her place within the Renaissance was assured.
Her publications led to her position as librarian at the segregated Dunbar High School in 1924. She donated some of her own books. She worked there for nearly twenty years.
Spencer published over thirty poems. Edankraal hosted many more notable black figures from the Renaissance era and beyond, including Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Dubois, and Martin Luther King.
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