Anne Spencer was a poet, civil rights advocate, teacher, librarian, wife, mother, and gardener. Most notably, Anne Spencer was an accomplished poet and figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the black literary and cultural movement of the s, with over thirty poems published in her lifetime.
Her work gained the respect and attention of other prominent writers like W. DuBois and Sterling A. She helped found the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP in and worked as a beloved librarian at the all-black Dunbar High School, expanding the literary opportunity for her students.
The Spencer home on Pierce Street became a salon for many notable guests and offered hospitality to African American travelers when laws of segregation barred them from hotels and fine dining. Anne occupied the rest of her time in her garden and writing cottage, Edankraal. Both parents were of mixed lineage. Her father, born a slave in Henry County in , was of black, white, and Seminole Indian ancestry.
According to Spencer's biographer J. Within a few years, the parents separated, and her mother took Annie to Bramwell, West Virginia, where she placed Annie in the foster care of William Dixie and his wife, a prominent black couple, so that Sarah Scales could work full time. Virginia Theological Seminary and College, c. Both her father and mother sought formal education for Annie, not in the inferior segregated public schools in West Virginia but in a relatively new preparatory and college institution for African Americans.
In , Scales brought Annie to Lynchburg to attend the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, pretending that the eleven-year-old who had never attended school was already twelve. The school today the Virginia University of Lynchburg was a pioneering Black College, offering an equal curriculum in spite of the patronizing view of its board that occupational training and literacy were enough.
