Anita Scott Coleman (1890-1960) Author and Poet

Anita Scott Coleman’s mother was a slave and her father a Buffalo Soldier. Raised on a ranch near Silver City, her award-winning essays, stories, and poems emphasized racial pride and black women’s issues during the Harlem Renaissance, the “New Negro Movement” of the 1920s. Her essay "Arizona and New Mexico–The Land of Esperanza" speaks of opportunity in a land of hope: “For here prevails for every man be he white or black a hardier philosophy—and a bigger and better chance, that is not encountered elsewhere in these United States.”.