Anne Spencer

Annie Bethel Bannister was born on the sixth of February 1882 at the village of Bramwell, in Henry County, West Virginia, the daughter of Joel Cephus Bannister — a formerly enslaved Black tavern owner of the principal West Virginia Black-and-incorporated-business community of the post-Reconstruction period — and Sarah Louise Scales, a domestic. She was raised across her parents' separation at Bramwell and at Bramwell, West Virginia and at Bramwell, Virginia and at the principal Bramwell-Pocahontas-County West Virginia post-Reconstruction Black community.

She was placed at eleven in 1893 at the Virginia Seminary at Lynchburg, Virginia — the principal Black-Baptist secondary school of post-Reconstruction Virginia — and completed the Virginia Seminary in 1899 as principal class valedictorian.

She married Edward Alexander Spencer on the fifteenth of May 1901 at Bramwell, Virginia — and was married to Edward Spencer until his death in 1964. They had three children — Bethel Calloway, Alroy Sarah, and Chauncey Edward — and lived from 1903 until her death at 1313 Pierce Street at Lynchburg, Virginia.

She began publishing poetry in the principal Crisis magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at New York in February 1920 — under the principal editorial direction of W. E. B. Du Bois and the principal literary editor Jessie Redmon Fauset.

She was named the principal Dunbar High School librarian at Lynchburg, Virginia in 1923 — at the principal opening of the Dunbar High School library, the principal first Black-Lynchburg public secondary-school library of the principal post-1923 Virginia segregated-public-school period. She held the principal Dunbar High School library position from 1923 to her retirement in 1945.

She was the principal Virginia hostess of the principal Harlem Renaissance literary-and-political community across the 1920s and 1930s — at the principal 1313 Pierce Street Spencer-household salon. The principal Spencer-household guests across the principal Harlem Renaissance period included James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson (placed in this archive), and the principal Harlem Renaissance and post-Renaissance Black-American literary-and-political community.

She published approximately thirty-five poems in the principal Harlem Renaissance literary magazines across the 1920s and 1930s — including the principal poems 'Before the Feast at Shushan', 'Lady, Lady', 'White Things', 'Letter to My Sister', and 'I Have a Friend'.

She was the principal subject of the principal posthumous biographical-and-poetic anthology Time's Unfading Garden of 1977 at the principal Louisiana State University Press — the principal recovery anthology of her surviving poetic-and-prose work.

She died at Lynchburg, Virginia on the twenty-seventh of July 1975 of natural causes, at ninety-three.

She is honored here as the principal Harlem Renaissance poet of Virginia.