Anne Bethel Bannister, later known as Anne Spencer, was born in Henry County, Virginia.
Anne Bethel Bannister was born on February 6, 1882, in Henry County, Virginia, to formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Louise Scales and Joel Cephus Bannister. Her early childhood was marked by her parents' separation, after which she was raised primarily by her mother, who worked hard to provide her daughter with opportunities for education and self-improvement, including boarding arrangements with a Lynchburg family so she could attend school.
Though her formal early schooling was delayed until age eleven, she quickly excelled, entering the Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg and graduating as valedictorian in 1899. This early life, shaped by the post-Reconstruction South and the resilience of her mother, laid the intellectual and emotional foundation for a woman who would become one of the most quietly influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance era, despite living her entire adult life in Lynchburg rather than New York City.
Her birth in this Jim Crow-era Southern county, to parents who themselves had been enslaved, situates her life story within the broader arc of African American history from slavery through emancipation, into the flourishing of Black arts and letters in the early twentieth century. Her later achievements as a poet, civil rights activist, librarian, and horticulturist can all be traced back to the determined, education-focused upbringing that began with her birth in 1882.