Anne Bethel Spencer (born Bannister; February 6, 1882 – July 27, 1975) was an American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener.

As a civil rights activist for equality and educational opportunities, she and her husband Edward, with close friend Mary Rice Hayes Allen and others, revived the chapter of the NAACP in Lynchburg, Virginia, which had begun in 1913.

[2] The Spencers' home became an important center and intellectual salon for guests and dignitaries such as Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B.

Although her father Joel was born a slave in 1862, Anne's parents were part of the first generation of African Americans whose childhood followed the abolition of slavery.

Mother and daughter moved to West Virginia and settled in Bramwell, a town whose acceptance of African Americans and immigrants was unusual for the time.

William T. Dixie, a proprietor of his own barber shop, his wife, Willie Belle, and their five children, were prominent members of the African American community.

It was this freedom in Bramwell that would lead to her development as a poet, through her explorations of the natural world and her reliance on the solitude she found in the only private place available to her, the family outhouse.

It was there in the outhouse, that Annie, as an illiterate child, would take the Sears and Roebuck catalog and seclude herself, turning the pages, imagining and dreaming herself as a reader.

[8] While at the Virginia Seminary Anne met fellow student Charles Edward Spencer, whom she married on May 15, 1901, at the Dixie's home in Bramwell.

Chauncey continued his mother's legacy of activism, playing a prominent role of military service during World War II.

Chauncey's actions and determination led to the formation of the Tuskegee Airmen and he became a noted member of the group during a time when African Americans were refused military service as pilots.

[6] Anne Spencer's literary life began while she was a student at the Virginia Seminary where she wrote her first poem, "The Skeptic," which is now lost.

[16] Her work was notably featured in Alain Locke's famous anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, which connected her to the lifeline of the Harlem Renaissance, despite the fact that she lived in Virginia, far from New York.

[17] In addition, her poems were included in The Book of American Negro Poetry, which was edited by another figure of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson.

In 2019, the United States Postal Service announced that Spencer would be featured on a 2020 Forever stamp honoring figures of the Harlem Renaissance.