Obour Tanner, also spelled Abour or Arbour (c. 1750 — June 21, 1835), was an enslaved African woman who lived in Newport, Rhode Island.

[7] Literary scholar Babacar M'Bye writes that Wheatley and Tanner used their "brutal separation from their homeland as an urge to create a female community based upon companionship and unity."

M'Bye also writes that the "friendship and solidarity that Wheatley and Obour Tanner created out of their shared experience of the Middle Passage reflects a Pan-African philosophy known as the experiential communality of blacks.

[8] In 1863, six letters from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner were donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society by the wife of William Henry Beecher.

Evidence suggests that it was through Tanner that Wheatley became aware of the plans made by Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins to send Africans Bristol Yamma and John Quamino as missionaries to West Africa.

In an accompanying letter, Mrs. Beecher described Tanner in her later years; "She was then a very little, very old, very infirm, very, very black woman, with a great shock of the whitest of wool all over her head.