Professor Mary Annette Anderson was born on July 27, 1874, in Shoreham, Vermont, to William John Anderson, a formerly enslaved person from Virginia, and Philomine Langlois Anderson, a French Canadian and American Indian from Canada. She had a younger brother named William John Anderson, Jr.
Anderson was educated at Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts, a coeducational school located in Franklin County. She excelled there, serving as the class president, writing a poem, and graduating in 1895. Following her time at Northfield, she enrolled in Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English as the valedictorian of her class. Her valedictory speech was titled โThe Crown of Culture.โ Additionally, she wrote and recited a poem in honor of her graduating class in 1899, making her the first African American woman to graduate from Middlebury and the first admitted to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the prestigious academic honor society founded in 1776 at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.
During the Class Day exercises in 1899, the event concluded with singing the class song โTenting on the Old Camp Ground,โ which Anderson composed. Anderson received a cash prize and significant recognition in the local newspaper for her achievements. However, her ethnicity was never mentioned in the write-up, and she faced barriers in securing employment in New England.
After graduating, Anderson moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where she taught at Straight University, a historically Black college located on Canal Street (now Dillard University), from 1899 to 1900. She then accepted a position as a professor of English grammar and history at Howard University in Washington, DC, where she remained until 1907.
On August 7, 1907, Anderson married Walter Lucius Smith, her academic colleague who taught at the historic M Street Academy for African American students and later became the principal of the renowned Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, when the name changed. Anderson did not work after marrying, and the couple maintained homes in DC and Shoreham.
Mary Annette Anderson Smith died on May 2, 1922, at 47, in Shoreham, Vermont. In honor of Anderson and Martin Henry Freeman, who graduated from Middlebury College in 1849 and became the first African American professor and college president in U.S. history, the Anderson Freeman Resource Center was officially established at Middlebury College in the fall of 2015.
