Effie Lee Newsome was a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance and the first famous African American poet whose majority of writings were focused on children’s literature and poetry. She was born Mary Effie Lee in Philadelphia in 1885 to mother Mary Elizabeth Ashe Lee and father Benjamin Franklin, a Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and editor of Philadelphia’s Christian Recorder. Her father’s work moved the family to Texas and then Ohio where they would remain. Newsome studied at Wilberforce University, Oberlin College, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania during the years 1901 to 1914, although she did not receive any degrees from them. She began her writing career in 1917 when she began working on The Crisis, one of the leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance. She married Reverend Henry Nesby Newsome in 1920 and, after moving to Alabama, she returned to Ohio with her husband where they eventually settled. There, Newsome would continue her writing profession while also becoming an elementary school librarian. From 1925 until 1929 Newsome edited the column of The Crisis entitled The Little Page and would continue to contribute to it until 1934. In this column, she wrote and illustrated poetry and fables aimed at children. In these works, she addressed what it was like for these children to be young and African American in the United States during this time. Newsome had specific goals that she wished to instill in her readers through this column. She wished to teach young black children that being African American was a beautiful thing to be celebrated. This is exemplified in one of her more well-known poems To a Brown Boy. She also aimed to teach her audience the history their people experienced, as well as how to take the anger felt towards white Americans that was prevalent in their community and transform it into love and compassion instead. In addition to writing for The Crisis, Newsome created illustrations for several other children’s magazines and was an editor for children’s columns published in the journal Opportunity. She published one collection of her poetry, also written for children, titled Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers (1940). While most of her works were written for children, Newsome did publish some other works throughout her career, including poems about nature and ones for an adult audience, published in The Poetry of the Negro (1949). Story derived from wikipedia.org.

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