Background

Effie Lee Newsome was born Mary Effie Lee on January 19, 1885, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. She was the daughter of Benjamin Franklin (a clergyman, chief editor of the Christian Recorder, and former president of Wilberforce University) and Mary Elizabeth (Ashe) Lee.

Education

Effie received her higher education from Wilberforce University (1901-1904), Oberlin College (1904-1905), the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (1907-1908), and the University of Pennsylvania (1911-1914).

Career

Effie Lee Newsome began publishing her stories and poems in 1915, in Crisis, and later went on to publish in magazines like Opportunity and Phylon. She was also a major contributor to The Brownies’ Book, a magazine published by W.E.B. Du Bois for young black children; the magazine contained a variety of features, including biographies of prominent black achievers. The magazine folded after four years, but not before Newsome had a chance to see eleven of her poems published.

In 1924, Newsome began writing “The Little Page” for Crisis, another Du Bois venture, and she continued writing for the magazine until 1925. “The Little Page” was like a miniature version of Brownies’ Book, and included poems, illustrations, and short prose writing.

Newsome’s poem “Morning Light: The Dew-drier” was firstly published in 1918 in Crisis. Interest in black literature of the time - 1918 was the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of black literature and arts - has led to the poem being frequently anthologized since.

In 1920, Newsome married a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Reverend Henry Nesby Newsome. Prior to this she had written under the name Mary Effie Lee, but dropped the Mary out of consideration for length when she took Newsome’s name. Together they moved to Birmingham, Alabama where he was given a congregation; during this time she taught elementary school and acted as the school librarian. They soon returned to Wilberforce, Ohio, however, where Newsome worked first as a librarian at Central State College, and finally at Wilberforce where she remained until she retired in 1963.

In 1944, her work Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers was published by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History', founded by Carter Woodson to promote black culture. A writer for the 1947 Negro History Bulletin says of Newsome that her “aim is not only to help children to appreciate the good and the beautiful but to express themselves accordingly.” Donnarae MacCann in the Oxford Companion to American Literature describes Newsome’s achievement as “giving youngsters two great gifts: a keen sense of their own inestimable value and an avid appreciation of the natural world.”

Achievements

• Effie Lee Newsome was one of the first African American poets, whose body of work consisted primarily of poems for children. Besides, she edited a column in The Crisis, where she made drawings and wrote poetry for children and parables about being young and black in the 1920s. Her only volume of poetry was Gladiola Garden (1940).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Wonders: The Best Children's Poems of Effie Lee Newsome

    (This new volume, which includes poems from Gladiola Garde...)

  • Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers 1944

Connections

Mary Effie Lee was married to Reverend Henry Nesby Newsome.

Father:

Benjamin Franklin Lee

Mother:

Mary Elizabeth Ashe Lee

Spouse:

Henry Nesby Newsome

References

• DLB 76: Afro-American Writers, 1940-1955
  1988
• Notable Black American Women
  1992
• The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
  1997