Effie Lee Newsome
Story by Andrea Lent
Effie Lee Newsome (1885-1979) was a Harlem Renaissance writer, naturalist, and gardener. She is 
famous for her volume of children’s poetry, Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers, which focused on helping Black children celebrate their own beauty by comparing their skin tones to the many colors of flowers.
As the NAACP got started, Newsome also worked extensively with W.E.B DuBois on TCrisis magazine, writing poetry for the magazine and editing the “Little Page” column. Her writings merged nature with the fight for civil rights, linking natural history and conservation to the problems of segregation.
Her most well-known poem is entitled “The Bronze Legacy (To a Brown Boy)”, in which her love of nature shines through:
’Tis a noble gift to be brown, all brown,
Like the strongest things that make up this earth,
Like the mountains grave and grand,
Even like the very land,
Even like the trunks of trees—
Even oaks, to be like these!
God builds
His strength in bronze.
To be brown like thrush and lark!
Like the subtle wren so dark!
Nay, the king of beasts wears brown;
Eagles are of this same hue.
I thank God, then, I am brown.
Brown has mighty things to do.
“The Bronze Legacy (To a Brown Boy)” is public domain.