Anita scott coleman biography meaning

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    • Anita Scott Coleman

    An important western voice in The Harlem Renaissance, Coleman taught and published more than thirty short stories and poetry, appearing in The Competitor, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, and other outlets popular with Harlem Renaissance writers.

    Novelist Anita Scott Coleman was an important western voice in the Harlem Renaissance, an early-twentieth-century movement of flourishing social, artistic, and political innovation among African Americans. The movement, known at the time as the “New Negro Experience,” was at its peak from 1918 to 1937 with continuing influence long after. Named for its symbolic locus in Harlem, this cultural revolution reflected a larger economic and social movement that involved Black communities throughout the United States.

    Coleman, an African-American woman who spent much of her childhood and young adult years in Silver City, New Mexico, was among those working outside the metropolitan centers during the Renaissance.

    Coleman was born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, in 1890. She moved with her family to New Mexico when she was still a child, settling on a ranch near Silver City. After high school, Coleman enrolled at New Mexico Teachers College (now Western New Mexico University), received a teaching certificate, and earned her living as a teacher. Coleman published her first story in 1919 and went on to publish nine others before leaving New Mexico in 1926 to join her husband in Los Angeles. That same year, she published the essay “Arizona and New Mexico – The Land of Esperanza” in The Messenger, a political and literary magazine by and for African-American people in the United States. In the essay Coleman discusses Arizona and New Mexico and the conditions of Blacks there at the time:

    “Boiled down to finality—these States [Arizona and New Mexico] are the mecca-land for the seeker after wealth—the land of every man to his own grubstake—and what-I-find-I-keep. And criss-cross

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    • Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance

    Recovers Coleman’s life and literary legacy

    One of the most distinctive and prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Anita Scott Coleman (1890–1960) found popular and critical success in the flourishing African American press of the early twentieth century. Yet unlike many of her New York–based contemporaries, Coleman lived her life in the American West, first in New Mexico and later in California. Her work thus offers a rare view of African American life in that region.

    Broader in scope than any previous anthology of Coleman’s writings, this volume collects the author’s finest stories, essays, and poems, including many not published since they first appeared in African American newspapers during the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40’s. Editors Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell introduce these writings with an in-depth biographical essay that places Coleman in the context of the Harlem Renaissance movement.

    The volume also features vintage family photographs, a detailed chronology, and a genealogical tree covering five generations of the Coleman family. Based on extensive research and written with the full cooperation of the Coleman family, Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance gives readers new understanding of this overlooked writer’s life and literary accomplishments.

    Finding “A House in Taos”

    AMONG THE BEST-LOVED POETS OF the 20th century, Langston Hughes stands tall. No shortage of poetry lovers around the globe can recite his “I, Too, Sing America,” but relatively few New Mexicans have heard the curious story of his spiritual connection to the Land of Enchantment. Otherwise, they might add his remarkable “A House in Taos” to their list of favorite poems.

    Similarly, students of the African American literary canon know Jean Toomer as the author of Cane, a seminal work of the Harlem Renaissance published in 1923. Cane is a tapestry of Afrocentric stories and poems ennobling the plight of Southern Black sharecroppers. Yet how many New Mexicans know Toomer also wrote paeans to Taos and Santa Fe, and filled notebooks with musings extolling the wonders of the Southwest?

    Although New Mexico’s Black population has historically been small, its literary practitioners have played an important part in what anthropologists call its “social imaginary,” or the values and institutions that people use to imagine their society. It’s the prism through which individuals belonging to a place and time see themselves. In that vein, Africans and Black Americans have contributed to New Mexico’s stories, myths, poetry, and identity since they first arrived, in the 1500s, usually as enslaved people under the early Spanish conquistadors. Their stories provide a twist to New Mexico’s tricultural (Anglo, Spanish, and Indigenous) narrative, highlighting both Black and multiethnic struggles for liberation.

    Anita Scott Coleman lived in Silver City. Photograph courtesy of the NM Historic Women's Marker Program.

    It would be difficult to find a more exciting or unlikely biography than the life of Esteban de Dorantes, the Morocco-born slave who accompanied his master on a 1527 voyage to the New World. After their vessel wre

    Anita Scott Coleman

    American writer (1890–1960)

    Anita Scott Coleman (November 27, 1890 – March 27, 1960) was an American writer born in Mexico and raised in New Mexico.

    Early life

    Anita Scott was born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, in 1890, the daughter of William Henry Scott and Mary Ann Stokes Scott. Her parents were American; her father was a Buffalo Soldier from Virginia, and her mother was a laundry worker, born under slavery in Florida. She was raised on a ranch near Silver City, New Mexico, where her father worked for the railroad. She trained as a teacher at the New Mexico Teachers College, graduating in 1909.

    Career

    Coleman wrote dozens of short stories, poems, silent film scenarios, and a children's book, The Singing Bells (1961). She also wrote a novel, Unfinished Masterpiece. Her poetry was published in the volumes Small Wisdom (1937) and Reason for Singing (1948). Her poems were also included in Negro Voices (1938) and Ebony Rhythm (1948). Her stories and essays were published in national Black outlets including Opportunity, Half-CenturyMagazine, The Messenger, The Crisis, and The Pittsburgh Courier, between 1919 and 1943. Scholarly interest in her works has grown in recent years, positioning her as a Western response to the Harlem Renaissance, and as an Afro-Latinx writer.

    She moved to Los Angeles, California, with her husband and children in 1926, and managed a boarding house. She won awards for her writing from The Crisis and from the Robert Browning Poetry Contest. In 1946, she was appointed chair of the YWCA advisory board at the University of Southern California.

    Personal l

  • Along the way, Coleman's stories also