Effie Lee Newsome
Effie Lee Newsome was an influential African American poet and author, born in 1885 into a prominent family deeply engaged in education and ministry. She was the daughter of Dr. Benjamin Franklin Lee, a notable educator and bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Growing up in a culturally rich environment, Newsome developed her passion for writing and illustrating at a young age, eventually attending several prestigious institutions, including Wilberforce University and the University of Pennsylvania.
After marrying the Reverend Henry Newsome in 1920, she moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where she became an active community member, founding the Boys Club of Birmingham. Throughout her life, Newsome produced a significant body of work, primarily focusing on children's poetry, which aimed to promote racial pride and appreciation for nature among young readers. She contributed extensively to the magazine Crisis, where she established a children's column, and her poetry was included in notable anthologies alongside esteemed contemporaries.
Despite the loss of many of her papers due to a tornado in 1974, Effie Lee Newsome's legacy endures through her poems, which remain an essential part of early African American children's literature. Her work continues to be celebrated and rediscovered, reflecting her impact on the literary landscape and her dedication to fostering joy and pride in African American youth.
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Effie Lee Newsome
- Born: January 19, 1885
- Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Died: May 12, 1979
Biography
In the late nineteenth century, Effie Lee Newsome was born into one of the era’s most prominent African American families; she was one of Dr. Benjamin Franklin Lee and Mary (nee Ashe) Lee’s five children. Her parents were graduates of Wilberforce University in Ohio. Benjamin Lee, who became a minister in 1869, taught at Wilberforce from 1873 to 1876, and from 1876 to 1884, he was the University’s second president. In 1885, the year of Effie’s birth, Lee became the editor of the Philadelphia-based The Christian Recorder, an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church newspaper that was distributed nationally.
The Lee family resided in Philadelphia until the Reverenc Lee was elected the twentieth bishop of the A.M.E. church in 1892, and the family moved to Texas. Four years later, the Lees moved to Ohio when Bishop Lee was transferred to a district that included Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states. During her childhood, Effie became interested in writing and drawing. She and her sister Consuelo won prizes for the poems and drawings they submitted to children’s pages in magazines.
She attended Wilberforce University, and after her graduation in 1904, she studied at Oberlin College from 1904 to 1905, Philadelphia’s Academy of Fine Arts from 1907 to 1908, and the University of Pennsylvania from 1911 to 1914. When she married the Reverend Henry Newsome in 1920, she changed her pen name from Mary Effie Lee to Effie Lee Newsome. The couple moved from Philadelphia to Birmingham, Alabama where Newsome’s husband was minister of a church and where she founded the Boys Club of Birmingham in 1925.
When the Newsomes moved to Ohio, she was employed as a librarian at Central State College and later at Wilberforce; Newsome retired in 1963. Although she wrote prose for children, young adults, and adults as well as created illustrations that appeared in various periodicals, Newsome is best known for her children’s poetry. Her poetry and short stories began appearing in the Crisis in 1915. By 1934, Newsome had contributed more than one hundred poems to this magazine founded by W. E. B. DuBois. During Newsome’s association with the Crisis, she established The Little Page, a children’s column.
Newsome also contributed verse and prose to The Brownies Book (1920-1921), a monthly magazine for African American children. Newsome’s contemporaries included her poetry in their anthologies; among these are Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927) and Arna Bontemps’s Golden Slippers (1941). The only collection of Newsome’s verse published during her lifetime is Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers (1940). More recently, Rudine Sims Bishop has published a compilation of Newsome’s verse, Wonders: The Best Children’s Poems of Effie Lee Newsome (1999).
Most of Newsome’s papers were lost after a tornado destroyed her Xenia, Ohio, home in 1974; however her verse remains the enduring legacy of a woman who was one of the twentieth century’s earliest authors of works for African American children and who sought to instill racial pride, childhood joy, and an appreciation of nature’s marvels in her young readers.