Studies in Black literature from the Civil War have focused mainly on a few influential movements centered in large northern cities.  Black writers in the South still remain largely unknown to the general reader.  J. Lee Greene, late professor of African-American literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has taken a pioneering step in his Time's Unfading Garden, Anne Spencer's Life and Poetry (Baton Rouge: LSU Press,  1977).  Anne Spencer (1882-1975), born Bannister and the daughter of slaves, was an American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener.  As a gardener, she often used imagery from the plants she cultivated to articulate her themes and often used the image of the garden itself. Although she never released a poetry volume, Spencer was a widely anthologized poet, and published more than thirty poems in anthologies and was the first Virginian and one of three African-American women included in the highly influential  Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. She was friendly with W. E. B,  DuBois and Langston Hughes, engaging in spirited discussions of society and poetry in her home.  She offended whites with her diatribes against white supremacy, school integration, and interracial friendships.  Despite spending most of her life in her Lynchburg hometown, her civil rights activism connected her with civil rights leaders and her home became an important center and intellectual meeting place for civil rights movement leaders such as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr. She also started a local chapter of the NAACP.  Although Spencer has been regarded as one of the significant female poets of the Harlem Renaissance, she was also an important innovator of American modernism.  At the time of her death, Spencer left behind unpublished work, including a novel and cantos in honor of abolitionist John Brown.