Exploring the life, times, and legacies of a female African American Progressive Era social reformer, writer, and thinker.
Introduction
In this discussion, two experts on Frances “Fannie” Barrier Williams—the historian, biographer, and distinguished professor emerita Dr. Wanda A. Hendricks and gender and Africana studies scholar Dr. Brittney Cooper—delve into the significance of Fannie Barrier Williams, born free to mixed-race parents in Brockport, New York, in 1855. Barrier Williams went on to become one of “the greatest thinkers of the black race,” according to The Colored American Magazine.[1] A writer and activist during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she spent the core of her career in Chicago after spending time in Hannibal, Missouri, and Washington, DC. Despite not being so well known now, she was one of the leading intellectuals of her generation, speaking and writing often about race, gender, suffrage, labor, and distinctive regional differences.
Brockport, New York, is a small town along the Erie Canal, about 30 miles west of Rochester on the way to Buffalo (and now the home of The Carryall, in the History Department on the State University of New York (SUNY) Brockport campus). Barrier Williams came of age in Brockport in the years prior to and during the Civil War. While the vast majority of Black Americans were enslaved, she wrote of never experienced enslavement and enjoyed a level of social and economic equality few other African Americans in the United States did. Her family was one of only a few Black or mixed-race residents in Brockport. Her father, Anthony Barrier, owned his own business, was a successful member of the business community, and served as the treasurer of the local Baptist Church. Her mother, Harriet Prince Barrier, devoted her time to rearing the couple’s three children. She then gradually moved into the larger Brockport community by teaching piano, leading bible classes, and buying and selling property.
As the debate about slavery divided the nation and the country marched toward civil war, Barrier Williams and her two older siblings attended school and played with white children in the Brockport community. In 1870, Barrier Williams became the first African American to graduate from State Normal and Training School at Brockport, the precursor to the State University of New York (SUNY) campus. The reconstruction of the nation after the Civil War offered Barrier Williams both hope and despair. Graduation from the Brockport Normal School afforded her the opportunity to pursue a professional career as a teacher, assist with reducing illiteracy rates among former slaves, who by law could not learn to read and write while enslaved, and to travel. She first found employment in the public schools of Hannibal, Missouri, a place that remained neutral during the war, but was filled with a large group of white residents who supported the Confederacy. Hannibal was quite different than Brockport. Institutionalized segregation in nearly every area of life in the town proved to be very difficult for Barrier Williams.
A move in 1877 to Washington, DC, offered Barrier Williams a new teaching post, an entrée to developing her art in portraiture and painting, and the opportunity to study piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston. The move also opened the door to daily associations with some of the most prominent Black women and men in the country, as well as access to Black societies, clubs, and churches. Discussions and debates in many of the organizations included Black history, social reform, philanthropy, economic issues, and the death of Reconstruction and its impact on the Black community. However, even in the nation’s capital, she and Blacks of all classes suffered from racism. Teachers taught Black children in overcrowded classrooms, and segregationist rules in employment, housing, and social interaction remained intact for Black residents in the city.
In Washington, Barrier Williams met Samuel Laing Williams, a graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbian University Law School (now George Washington University). The couple married in 1887 and moved to Chicago, where he opened a law practice with prominent attorney and newspaper editor Ferdinand Barnett. Illinois, particularly its largest city, Chicago, would become a national industrial powerhouse. Barrier Williams found new opportunities and shifted from her career as a teacher to a multi-pronged profession of public speaking, writing, and advocating for welfare reform, labor rights, and suffrage for women. Her leadership in the Prudence Crandell Literary Club led to her association with the Illinois Woman’s Alliance, a multi-racial labor organization for women in the industrial age. She played a major role in raising funds for the creation of the interracial Provident Hospital, which opened in 1891. A vociferous proponent of an emerging Black professional class, she advocated for jobs for Black female nurses to staff the hospital. She was appointed “clerk in charge of colored interests” for the World’s Columbian Exposition and was one of the few Black women who spoke at the official Exposition proceedings in 1893.
In 1895, she attended the Colored Woman’s Congress held at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. There she talked about “The Opportunities and Possibilities of the ‘Negro Woman’” even as the system of Jim Crow segregation intensified. When she returned home to Chicago, she remained mired in a contentious battle over her nomination by several prominent white women for membership in the whites-only Chicago Woman’s Club. The ordeal lasted nearly two years and finally ended in 1896, when she became the first Black member.
Barrier Williams played a key role in the creation of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, which held its second conference in Chicago two years later. By 1898, she was presiding over the Federation of Afro-American Clubs in Illinois, working with other Black women to highlight concerns about educational quality, inadequate housing and jobs, lynching, Jim Crow cars, and the convict lease system.
As a leading advocate for women’s political equality, Barrier Williams was at the forefront of the suffrage battle in Illinois and the nation. She participated in a gala event with white stalwarts in the suffrage movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1895. When Illinois granted women the right to vote in school board elections a few years earlier, in 1891, she argued that Black women, whose lives were shaped by race and gender discrimination, had to be far more strategic than white or Black men, or even white women, when it came to their newfound enfranchisement.
On the cusp of what would become known as the Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans moved out of the South to places such as Chicago, Barrier Williams joined fellow activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett in supporting the campaigns of two white female candidates. Black women and men in the Second Ward elected Oscar DePriest, the first African American alderman in the city. And in the 1916 presidential election, a coalition of Black women, including Barrier Williams, opened the Colored Women [Charles Evans] Hughes Republican Committee Headquarters in Chicago. They worked against the re-election of the Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson, who, as president, held racist views and celebrated films such as the racist Birth of A Nation.
Barrier Williams never wavered from her commitment to interracial cooperation. Her national audiences included Black and white individuals, groups, and organizations across the country. Her articles appeared in numerous outlets, including the NACW’s The Woman’s Era, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ The Club Woman, New York Age, The Voice of the Negro, The Southern Workman, Godey’s Magazine, The Colored American, The A. M. E. Church Review, and The Independent. Her forceful critiques of racism in America serve as a reminder that, as she wrote, “There is nothing noble or gainful in a great nation, so abundant in opportunities, in trying to force down and under a part of its citizenship.”[2] For Williams, the promise of the United States would depend on whether it could deliver full citizenship for all.
Following the deaths of her husband and a number of close allies in Chicago’s social reform circles in the early 1920s, Barrier Williams returned to Brockport. She lived quietly there with her sister for the last decades of her life, from 1926 until 1944.
In 2022, the Village of Brockport officially deemed October 6th of each year “Fannie Barrier Williams Day.” That same year, the State University of New York campus in Brockport renamed its Liberal Arts Building after Fannie Barrier Williams. A new sculpture of her, created by Rochester sculptor Olivia Kim, is now on display in the building’s lobby. The university also maintains a fellowship program in her name as well, and in 2023, SUNY Brockport initiated the Fannie Barrier Williams Project, a cross-departmental, student-driven, public history effort to explore her life, times, and legacies.
As part of the Fannie Barrier Williams Project, The Carryall convened a conversation between Dr. Hendricks and Dr. Cooper, two experts on her. It took place in January 2025 and has been edited for clarity.
A Political Theorist
Brittney C. Cooper: It was in the course of researching Beyond Respectability that I began to run across her writings. I read her address at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. I knew that Anna Julia Cooper had been there. I knew that Ida B Wells-Barnett protested outside. But I wasn’t aware of all of these other Black women being there. When I read Fannie Barrier Williams, it opened up the picture for me. We tend to tell that story as one where Cooper, Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell are different kinds of intellectuals. Ida B. Wells-Barnett is more the activist. Mary Church Terrell is many things: she’s a writer, an intellectual, an activist, and an organizer. She’s all of these things. We think of Dr. Anna Julia Cooper as the professorial one among them.
Wanda A. Hendricks: She was unlike any other Black woman in the history that I had known. The narrative that I’d always heard was always about these Black women struggling, always fighting against the system, because there was always racism and sexism. But Williams grew up in Brockport. In my research, I’m not finding her encountering any of those things. She was just such an oddity for me. And in some ways, she remains so.
BCC: I’m reading Fannie Barrier Williams, and I realized she’s a political theorist, she is deeply intellectual, deeply erudite, and that she thinks frankly in a sociological manner about the project that she’s engaged in, both what Black communities need and what black organizations can do in Black communities. Then I was hooked. I wanted to know: how do you become this Black woman in the nineteenth century? How are you received as this intellectual Black woman in the nineteenth century who is writing, but not necessarily books, who is elite, but also has really important class commitments?
I also found her to be asking really interesting questions about things. She has this essay where she asks: do we need a new name? Should we be Afro-Americans or should we be colored or should we be Negro? And I thought, oh, this is a perennial debate! She felt like an intellectual kindred spirit across time. I was deeply intrigued and just needed to know more.
WAH: As an individual, I think she gives us a real good picture of what an African American woman of her stature was doing at the time. She was a Northerner who would go South, lived there for a while, and then went to the Midwest. Her own geographical movements give us a history. She’s born in the 1850s and she doesn’t die until 1944. So we’re seeing her coming of age at the same time that America is coming of age. In that sense, we’re getting to look through her eyes and this lens of hers to see what is happening to her, what is happening to the country, what is happening to Black people, what’s happening to Black women.
What we’re seeing through her is a larger narrative of Black movement and Black women’s movement. She is moving around the country, traveling even in the midst of the most horrific Jim Crow, the lynchings, all of those things. Fannie Barrier Williams goes to the deep South and gives a presentation. She’s talking about the Ku Klux Klan-type person, and she actually calls them crackers! So she was real clear about who they were and harm they inflicted.
A Fighter Within the System
BCC: I find her to be so interesting as a theorist and so far ahead of her time. One of the arguments she makes in her 1893 speech at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the same place where Frederick Jackson Turner talks about his “Frontier Thesis,” is against American exceptionalism. She tries to develop a different language from her own experiences for how to tell the American story and the Black story.
In another essay from the AME Church Review in 1897, she talks about the need for a new racial “sociality.” These days, the term is all the rage in gender studies and queer studies. All my students are doing affect theory and talking about different forms of sociality now. But I say, “well, this is actually a very old term!” We’ve always had our own Black affect theorists. We just didn’t call someone like Williams that because what does that even mean?
Yet she was talking about the same thing: the bonds of energy and spirit that flowed between Black people that caused them to affect and be affected by each other, which is why she used the term “sociality.” She argues it isn’t blood that is the basis for racial connection. It’s shared history. It’s an intentional investment in each other and in notions of love and brotherhood. Today, we would say she was an anti-essentialist. She might even have bordered on a kind of postmodernist account of race. She doesn’t believe there is some essential notion of blackness that binds people together. She has a much more expansive, cosmopolitan view of how Black people lived.
WAH: Even though she saw herself as part of the elite—not just the Black elite, but the elite in America as a whole—she was adamant about the possibilities for Black women and Black people. She is also real clear about what it means to be a Black woman. She is crossing borders to work with white women, but she’s also still seeing their racism and the ways in which they are still trying to ignore Back women.
BCC: She is very useful in thinking through how Black women understood the performance of respectability, but also pushed against the critical limits of it. She’s really a theorist about what you need if respectability isn’t the only thing you want to offer to Black communities. She doesn’t deny either her elite status or her investment in being elite, but, for her, you can couple that with a political commitment to a broad humanist sensibility and connection to Black people.
WAH: I do understand that we are suspicious of Black people who can navigate white spaces as well as Black spaces. We’re very suspicious of them.
BCC: I have questions about that in the day-to-day. What did those interactions look like? Was she actually one of the girls with Black women? Because it’s hard to do that and also get into the [all-white] Chicago Women’s Club.
WAH: I go back to the geography. She was born in Brockport, and until we understand what that means, we can’t understand her. She was never enslaved. Everything that she was doing had been in freedom. Now, New York itself has its own history of racism. It had slavery. It still didn’t treat Black New Yorkers as free free people. They had to own land or have something of value to participate in social and political machinations of their local communities and in the state. So it has its own story. Nevertheless, she lived in this insulated village. That allowed her freedoms that most of the other Black women that we are writing about today did not have. This shapes her.
She was always around white people. The people at her wedding who attended her wedding—who attended to her at her wedding—were white women. They were her friends from Brockport. She was engaged and involved with white people on an intimate level. An intimacy that we have not explored yet. Her father was a treasurer of the all-white church in town. They elected him. They kept electing him. He got to handle the money. He’s got a business in the town. And she’s going to school with white kids. They didn’t even identify whether the kids were Black or white in the school at Brockport. You’re looking through these documents from Brockport, and there’s no “colored” there. How do you know these kids are Black or white? You’re having to go through the census. It was that kind of place.
Then she goes to Chicago, and her best friend, or one of them, is Celia Parker Woolley, a white social reformer, Unitarian minister, and novelist. Woolley and some of her other white friends decided to nominate Fannie Barrier Williams for admission into the all-white Chicago Women’s Club. And then the majority of the Chicago Women’s Club said, not happening! Now, eventually they succeeded. But it took a while and a lot of strategizing. It was a struggle, but they were so committed to the struggle that they forced a constitutional change.
Yet when she was admitted into the Club, and embraced by her white friends, many Black people questioned her because she’s sitting at the homes eating dinner with white women such as Celia Parker Woolley. For many Black people, the feeling was, “Can we trust you fully or not?” That’s what racism does.
BCC: That’s right. Yes, what thing are you selling us out on? In what way are you compromising your integrity?
WAH: She was integrated. She’s going to white women’s homes or white people’s homes and having dinner with them. Now think about that during Jim Crow. I wanted her to be a fighter against racism and its indignities, like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, but she never was. I don’t care how much I try to put her in that box; I could not do it. And because she doesn’t fit, she has not gained the notoriety that she should have.
BCC: I mean, she was basically a Progressive Era version of a DEI professional. I think that a lot of folks who get positioned in these DEI roles, they might do well to read some Williams, because she might be a model for how you can hold a set of competing commitments with a certain level of integrity. Now I don’t want to just reduce her to that or be derisive, but I do mean that she had the deftness to bring all of these different groups to the table and be able to talk to them and hold coalitions together. When I think about her in today’s moment, she is this kind of professional power broker who had access to elite spaces, but also radical commitments to her own people.
WAH: It is a unique space that she has in American history and in African American history and in women’s history. And we still, as a group, as scholars of Black women’s history, still have not come to terms with it. That is because we need her pushing against the system, fighting it, in a way that we understand. We want her to be on the front lines, ready to get hosed, killed, or whatever. And she wasn’t having it. She is in the system. She is a writer. And she uses that as her weapon. And she uses herself. I think that’s the part that people aren’t getting.
BCC: The thing you’re also pointing to is that we like to think that there was—there is—only one narrative even of race and racial fixity and segregation in the country. But there’s not. There’s all these other worlds or possibilities or ways we could have been, other models in these smaller places. She has the rare experience of having been able to peek behind the veil and see another version of the world. Then she spends her life trying to enact it, saying I know this is possible because this is who I am formatively.
Sustaining Racial Justice Work in Challenging Times
WAH: We also forget that she was terribly offended by racism. When she was blocked from getting in the Chicago Women’s Club, this hurt her deeply. Just as Ida B. Wells in that suffrage march in Washington, DC in 1913. We sort of gloss over it, but she was hurt so desperately she started crying. I think we tend to make these women super women, super Black women, and don’t give them feelings. We just sort of gloss over how hurt they were. Well, they really were devastated, but they got themselves back up.
BCC: I think about it in this moment now of 2025, because I think we’re dealing with a couple of generations of younger people who have had a lot of integration, and we’re staring down the barrel of a resurgence of the very kind of racism that Fannie Barrier Williams saw return. We’re being told in this moment that you have to disavow your racially integrated childhood as a lie. You were just mistaken. You were fooled. The wool was pulled over your eyes. She complicates that because, against all odds, she managed to hold an intact, core self. She believed in a racial integration project, even when she saw it receding. I think that’s really admirable.
WAH: We forget that African Americans had just come out of slavery. These are women who are only one or two generations from slavery. I think we forget that. The country had no clear system in place to incorporate them into the polity, into society. For white people, maybe, but not for Black people. There was nothing. It was the force of black women that gave Black people some kind of space where there were social services. It was through Black women that these social services come to be. Black men help too, but it was really the force of Black women.
BCC: I think about this a lot. For those who don’t know, Professor Hendricks is also one of the canonical writers on the club women’s movement. I’m reading you in graduate school and I’m learning about the club women’s movement. I’m wondering why I’m enamored with these club women because at the time, there’s this emergent discourse in Black feminism to not talk about the elites. We just need to be talking about working-class women. But I felt different because I know these women. I was raised by these kind of churchy, institution-builder women who ran Sunday School and vacation Bible School and cared for the sick. I’m deeply Southern, so I just have this affinity for club women that’s not about their elitism, but instead about the way that they had a notion of politicized care.
WAH: The elites weren’t perfect, of course. At the same time, what would have happened to any of us if they hadn’t created a social safety net? Fannie Barrier Williams comes of age with these high-powered women. I mean, I am truly fascinated by what they were able to accomplish under such horrible conditions.
BCC: I’m thinking about that now. We’re facing the dismantling of the social safety net. We’re going to see it in a way that we simply have not seen it since the time of these women during the height of Jim Crow. Sometimes when I’m in my radical Black feminist spaces, and people are doing all this posturing about being abolitionist and arguing we just need to build new worlds, coupled with this class analysis about how we’re not elitist.
The problem is that your only model for people who, in the face of government abandonment, built a whole civil society for Black functioning are these club women that you want to dismiss as elitist! They built the schools. They built the libraries. They built the hospitals. They built the convalescent homes. They built the nurseries. I’m thinking of Lugenia Burns Hope in the Neighborhood Union. They figured out ways to study themselves and to have social workers and professionalizing schools. And here you have Fannie Barrier Williams doing all of that, too. She’s in the club movement. She’s organizing clubs. She’s a suffragist. She’s doing all of that work.
WAH: I think had she been born in more modern times, people might have still been suspicious of her, but I figure she would not have cared and would have been one of the people still traveling around the country. Everybody would have known her name.
BCC: I always find it interesting when today’s college kids say, “but what about her class politics?” I respond: If you wanted the life that the people back on your block who can’t make a living wage had, you could have stayed there. You chose not to. You chose to come to be in this other space where you could read books for four years, and you could be in community, and you could learn.
I find some of our bellyaching around class relations, particularly in the university, to be about us and not about the people that we are studying. It is our own survivor’s guilt about having access. What else do we think that Black communities would have been doing one to two generations removed from slavery, when our folks struggled with literacy and needed access, and had to be able to support families, and didn’t have a social safety net to rely upon? Then all of a sudden, one of us has an education. What are you going to do? Are you going to lord it over other folks? Or are you going to create training programs to help others get a better job?
WAH: Which is what Fannie Barrier Williams was promoting.
BCC: Exactly. And so this kind of performance that we do, I’m exhausted sometimes by the performance of our own anxieties. Because I think that then, in the scholarship, we impose it on these women.
WAH: I agree with you. It is a funny place that we’re in as historians and especially as scholars of Black women’s history. We are still debating these issues about trying to make all of these people fit in a particular box that makes us comfortable. That’s really what we’re doing. And Fannie Barrier Williams does not make us comfortable.
A Black Feminist Intellectual and Social Activist
BCC: When women like Fannie Barrier Williams in Chicago created training programs to help with stenography, to help with domestic work, all of these different kinds of work, it wasn’t “we want to dress you up and make you sound like you’re middle class and respectable.” It was a set of assimilationist tactics that you could learn to minimize the harm and the disrespect that people have for you. We have flattened that to an argument that any professionalizing impulse is only about respectability and is not about anything else of any value. And I think that that’s a place where our political critique might technically be righteous, but not super useful.
WAH: I started with Ida B. Wells-Barnett. She was my person. Because she grew up in Mississippi and so she had that hard life that we’d all talked about. She comes out of slavery, her parents come out of slavery. All of the things that I was used to. All that hardship. But then I get to Fannie Barrier Williams. She has no seeming hardship. And you were almost sure when she spoke or wrote that she was going to get up and say something nice. She may be telling you off, but it was going to sound really pretty.
BCC: I read her to be flexing on the dudes all the time.
WAH: It’s real clear that she wasn’t a Du Bois fan.
BCC: No (laughing).
WAH: She just was not. Now, she didn’t publicly get in a fight with him.
BCC: Yeah, I picked that up.
WAH: You can see that she tried to sort of balance out the sort of Washington-Du Bois craziness. But she wasn’t very good at it. It was clear that she was a Washingtonian. Well, for a while, for a long while. Part of that, too, was for political reasons at some point, for her husband. But she didn’t think too highly of these boys.
BCC: No.
WAH: And I need to not call them boys, but that’s what they were acting like. But yeah, I don’t think they thought a whole lot of them. They just didn’t publicly do all this craziness because these Black women were like, “What are you doing? People need to be fed.”
BCC: That’s right. Y’all are just talking! So we’re coming to the front. Because all y’all are doing is just talking. And I love it because I do think the only way to make space for these women in this over-determined narrative is just to provincialize them.
It irritates every feminist bone in my body because the men were forging their own thinking in relationship to these women. They’re watching what they’re doing. They’re watching how they’re moving. They’re reading them in these periodicals. Some of them are publishing these women in their periodicals. Why do we think that the thinking is only flowing from a sort of Du Bois-Washington framework and prior to him, a Frederick Douglass framework, down to these women, rather than that they are all in community working out ideas and then bringing them back to the fore?
WAH: Maybe it goes back to how Frederick Douglass was a family friend. He made visits to Brockport. He stopped off in Chicago and stayed with her and her husband, S. Laing. And then she moves to Booker T. Washington once Frederick Douglass dies. She becomes part of the Washington coalition. The Chicago people didn’t particularly like it very much.
BCC: Du Bois was a genius in many respects. Booker T. Washington was his own form of genius. He wasn’t my favorite, but I understand him as a complicated figure. But these women, they were unimpressed with these dudes. Du Bois didn’t figure out how to put the NAACP together until he watched the club women do it for a decade before him.
WAH: Right, exactly.
BCC: He tried with the Afro-American Council, and he tried with the Afro-American League, and both of them went belly up. And the sisters came along and said, here’s how you do local, regional, national organizing and create a framework for it. Only about ten years in, he realizes he can do this.
WAH: The NACW was the largest Black organization in the country. Most people don’t know that. Everybody points to the NAACP. It’s like, what?!
BCC: Fannie Barrier Williams comes for Du Bois in 1899 because the Afro-American Council and the NACW meet in the same city in the same week that year. He writes about the two Negro organizations and that the women were so beautiful, with all their different accents and beautiful colored dresses, and they had all these talks about children and kindergartens and equal moral standards for men and women.
And then he argues that the Afro-American Council was more representative of the rank and file of Negroes and represented more people! She just comes for him. She doesn’t name him by name, but she writes about the work the NACW is doing. We are the ones that are creating race public opinion, she explains. That’s the framework that she uses. It’s totally a reaction to Du Bois and his attempt to condescend and patronize and minimize these women.
An Education Critique and a Pro-Working Class Politics
WAH: She also has an education critique. She’s very much engaged with that. And Washington had a school. He had Tuskegee. Du Bois didn’t have a school. Everything was about teaching for her. That was one of the reasons that she gravitated towards Booker T. Washington. Regardless of all his other politics, he was at heart an educator.
Plus, he was going to do whatever was necessary, grovel if he had to, for that educating work. Every Black person in America invited him all across the country to come and give a talk. I don’t know where he found the time to do all of that, but he was doing it. Oftentimes, he gave the same speech over and over. And then, the white people liked him, at the time. Until they didn’t. But they liked him, and they were willing to give money.
That’s one of the reasons that she liked him. Because he was doing a service to the Black community. It wasn’t an intellectual service. It was a basic need. The people that were going to Tuskegee, they were learning. It was basic education. It was almost like junior high or high school education. I think we tend to forget that part.
When she talked about domestic workers, it’s almost as if she was specifically trying to create the first labor union for Black domestics. Black domestics even had Black people talk down to them, think of them as “less than,” and saw them just as servants. She was saying, no, they’re not just servants. They’re picking up all this stuff around your house. They’re doing all the things that enable you to live the life that you live. She recognized that she was able to do what she did because they had somebody in their home. But because she also was aligning with white club women, Black people got angry.
When she talked about technical schools, especially in Chicago, it was because white kids were going to them. That’s what she told audiences: the white kids like it, we ought to be liking this too! This is a good thing. They’re learning a skill. They can be good citizens. And they can make money.
The funny thing is that, particularly in the South, the domestic workers were part of the women’s clubs too. This class line that we as historians have drawn did not exist in the same way. We are writing a false history when we use class lines as we understand them today. Those class lines were very blurred. Because Black people, for the most part, had no money!
BCC: Part of the reason that Fannie Barrier Williams is a Bookerite is because she has a labor critique? Also, her husband’s professional ambitions with Washington’s patronage network?
WAH: The relationship actually begins through the Unitarians in Chicago. They’re donating books to Tuskegee. You start seeing these letters that go back and forth between Williams’ husband, S. Laing, and Booker T. Washington. Fannie Barrier Williams becomes part of that world. It’s a complicated world that she’s trying to figure out.
BCC: We can miss the substance and the heft of her thinking, like all of the women of that time, because it gets overdetermined by the scholarly investment in the Du Bois-Washington framework. We just all always, no matter what, go back to that framework.
WAH: Booker T. Washington embraced Fannie Barrier Williams. And so she chose a side. In the end, it cost her, but she figured out how to move past it. It does beg the question: why we need to have these Black women be one thing or fit into that framework alone?
BCC: What happens if we don’t tell it as the Du Bois-Washington story? Not just to be contrarian—although I’m okay with a little bit of contrarianism—but also because I really do think that she offers a reframing. She is one narrative arc in a reframing of Black people’s story, whether you’re talking about her Great Migration story is a really complicated one, right? It’s North to South to Midwest and back again.
Organized Anxiety
WAH: I think she had aged by the time of the 1919 Chicago race riots. She was horrified by those. She had just become the first Black woman and the first African American they put on the Library Board, but then S. Laing died, Celia Parker Woolley died. She had all of these things that were traumatic to her. It seems to me that she never really recovered from the Chicago race riots and all of the other trauma from this generation of women who had been fighting the system for so long.
So the question about her going back to Brockport at the end of her life. It made sense to me that she would gather her sister and they’d move back to the home place, to the place that had been the utopia for her. Brockport was no longer that utopia anymore, but in her mind, it would bring back something familiar to her. At least she believed that it would.
BCC: I love that she used the language of “organized anxiety” in one of her pieces. Anxiety is such an interesting word. All these women had gutting experiences, but it’s only Fannie Barrier Williams who says, yes, we did the work because we were anxious. We took all that anxiety, that anxiousness that we had about possibility and what we needed, and we tried to organize it into a plan to help our community.
WAC: I’m reminded of not Fannie Lou Hamer, but the woman in the civil rights movement who ended up having a nervous breakdown.
BCC: Anne Moody?
WAH: Right. Here she is. She’s in the struggle. She actually had a nervous breakdown. Nobody talks about that much. One of the things we also should recognize is that Black women have serious health issues that come from the anxiety of living in this difficult environment.
BCC: Yes, I love Fannie Barrier Williams’s ability to articulate a different thing for Black women that is not just strength. Not being formidable. I mean, she was strong and formidable and a power broker, but when you read her, you also get this sort of rich interiority and this attunement to the emotional life of what it takes to be this kind of woman. I see her giving a political language to Black women’s internalized struggle.
WAH: I wholeheartedly agree. I see this as this constant tension in the African American community. We also see it in Fannie Barrier Williams’s life. Yet she actually is giving us a lesson on how to create safety nets for Black people, how to organize, how to secure jobs, how to make more money.
BCC: From childhood forward, the few times I had Black teachers, they were the advocates. They were the ones saying, “This is how you have to do it. This is what you have to do.” And there’s just no day that I wake up and think, “Oh my goodness, they imposed some terrible class politics.” I have been able to have a particular life because of them.
WAH: This is a tension we still feel as Blacks in academia, especially, particularly those of us who study Black women. And particularly for those of us who are the first people in our family to graduate from college, and then to go on and get this thing called a Ph.D., people from where we come from ask, “what the heck is that”?
BCC: How do you explain it?
WAH: I’ve discovered that you really cannot explain it, no matter how hard you try. Because it’s not a medical doctor. So in our quest to navigate between all these class worlds, we’re not allowing for those of us who come from these backgrounds to be able to have a legitimate place in any of those worlds.
BCC: One of the things Fannie Barrier Williams and other club women figured out was what it took to navigate these different institutions. Many of them kept it as a political goal not merely to assimilate, but also to make sure that if they made it into the institution, they made space for other Black folks to come along and to benefit from that.
WAH: We had to learn how to navigate a white world, an institutionally white world. We have had that as part of our training. Who trained us to do that? For me, it was a Black female scholar. Who learned it herself.
BCC: It actually also really matters that we’re talking today about Fannie Barrier Williams and the women with whom she did all this organizing. Because there’s a particular enmity in this moment towards Black women.
WAH: That’s exactly right.
Thinking About (and Like) Fannie Barrier Williams Today
BCC: Here’s why I think it is so important. We are having this conversation during a regime change in the United States that has explicitly said they think the 1890s is a really good model to which the country should return. Any Black women’s historian of the nineteenth century worth her salt will tell you that the 1890s is when it all goes to pot for Black communities after the Civil War. That’s not a benign decade that they’re choosing. It’s a decade when Black people made progress, and then it all got taken away.
So we’re going to live through a period of massive government abandonment. Sure, there’s been governmental ineptness forever and a lack of care and a lack of doing justice to marginalized communities, to Black and brown folks, forever, but that’s different from a kind of active malicious intent to destroy and harm communities. Part of what it means to grapple with the legacy of Fannie Barrier Williams is that she makes us what it’s going to take in our own moment. How are you going to feed people, clothe them, take care of their health, and give them an education? All efforts at revolution and change have to solve that problem.
WAH: How are you going to help these older Black women and people who depend on Social Security, all those kinds of things?
BCC: When women like Fannie Barrier Williams lived through governmental collapse and abandonment of Black communities after Reconstruction, they said, what do our communities need? What are the resources we have and how do we build it? It’s not just enough to say that these Black women matter, that we need to recover their histories. It is also about saying, all of the work they’re doing is in a context of visceral hatred, a visceral hatred of Black communities and of these Black women, and, in particular, of Black women’s audacity to not be defeated and to keep on trying and to have dreams and aspirations. And that is always met with the most massive backlash.
I am from Louisiana, and I have a whole public history project that I did there about a decade ago, around a famous clubwoman from Louisiana. And when I went back through the archives, this is the same stuff they’re doing just in local communities. How do we have parks that are not segregated so our people and our kids have a place to play and get exercise? Which is like one of the big kind of fights that they were having in the community. How do we protect Black girls when white boys ride down the avenue in their cars on Sundays and yell terrible things at the Black girls and threaten them? What do we do as a community about that? Well, all of those things are going to come back to the fore now, and we’re not going to have a government that even gives any pretense about wanting to protect any aspect of a social safety net.
WAH: That is what they were doing. None of what we have today would have been possible.
BCC: And here’s the thing, and they don’t want it for anybody. It’s not just Black people. They don’t want it for working-class folks. They don’t want it for poor folks. They don’t want it for anybody that isn’t already rich and well-to-do. What I do know is that one group that I can look at in history that built a civil society, a kind of shadow civil society, in the face of massive abandonment, is Black club women, helped along by some of the dudes. These women built a local, regional, and nationally connected network, and then they would come to the national conferences to trade notes with each other about how to go back to their local spaces and enact whatever the program was that someone else was doing in some other region of the country.
WAH: There is such anger towards Black women and derision towards Black women. But we continue to get up every day. That’s what these women did. That’s why it was deeply disturbing to me when I started watching these scholars that were coming along and decided that the club women were the enemy. We’ve gotten used to the government, to the social services net. It’s been inadequate, but it’s been there. What happens when it goes away? What happens to the lives that we lead when our government fails us? What you do then?
BCC: We live in a deeply anti-Black, deeply anti-Black woman world that thinks that all of the best thinking originates everywhere but the mind of a Black woman. I mean, 2024 was marked at the very top of the year with the resignation of Claudine Gay and at the very bottom of the year with the defeat of Kamala Harris. And that’s all that I need to say. That is the story.
WAH: That is the story.
BCC: There are many things we could say about 2024 and the way the election played out. And I don’t feel compelled to say all of the things. But we do have to say that we need to think very seriously about the fact that the hatred of Black women is endemic to the American story, that this enmity towards Black women is core to this kind of foundational narrative of America, that these are the abject others. Their job is just to reproduce laborers for the Republic, not to run it, not to reproduce democracy, not to do any of that.
WAH: Not to save America from itself. None of that.
BCC: Just to produce labor. That is what was the understanding of Black women’s role. Now today we have had Black women professors, district attorneys, a president of Harvard, even a vice president. And once again, we are having a massive backlash against their advancements. So now is a moment for us to go back and to look at what happened in a different time when you had the same kind of resurgence of massive racial violence and a group of accomplished Black women trying to deal with it.
These are women who spent a significant part of their young adulthood with the benefits of Reconstruction. And by the time they’re rounding 30 or 40, all of a sudden all of that stuff gets snatched away. Now they’re in a context of massive racial violence that they thought that they had escaped. Well, I’m 44. I lived a significant portion of my life with a narrative of a multicultural, integrationist, progressive America that even elected a Black president. Now we are faced with a level of retrenched racial violence that none of us really dared to allow ourselves to believe was fully possible. Now it is here. It is knocking on our door. It’s parallel.
WAH: We don’t know everything that will happen in the next few years, but we know too much about what has happened to Black women in the past. We’re seeing what’s coming. That this isn’t simply a policy issue. This isn’t simply about rounding people up. This isn’t simply about a convict being in office, or a sexual assaulter. This isn’t simply about moral character or anything like that. This is way bigger.
BCC: When I look to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and all their homegirls, I want to know from them, how did you show up spiritually and cope? Not just what did you build, but how did you get up out of the bed every day after thinking the story was going to go one way, seeing the end of slavery, seeing Reconstruction, seeing Black people hold office, seeing all of this promise, and then literally watching it be smashed? How did you get up and find the fortitude to keep fighting, to keep building, to keep showing up while also combating all of the violence that came with that regime—the lynchings, the rapes, all of it, you know, the unfair incarceration, the housing discrimination, the educational exclusion—all of that stuff that these folks are flirting with doing to us again, how did you find the internal fortitude to keep showing up?
Those are the questions that I ask of these women. That’s why I sit with them. That’s why they matter to me as both a scholarly and a political matter. That is why I love these women. That is why I come back to them over and over again.
About the Authors
Wanda A. Hendricks is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History Department at the University of South Carolina, where she taught undergraduate and graduate history courses on Black women, African Americans, and the United States. She served as National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians from 2003 to 2005, senior editor of the three volume encyclopedia Black Women in America: Second Edition, published by Oxford University Press in 2005, and editor of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History series at the University of Illinois Press from 2013 to 2024. Her books include The Life of Madie Hall Xuma: Black Women’s Global Activism during Jim Crow and Apartheid (University of Illinois Press, 2022), which was recognized as a Darlene Clark Hine Book Award Honorable Mention and was a Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Award Finalist; Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing The Borders of Region and Race (University of Illinois Press, 2013), which was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Prize; and Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (Indiana University Press, 1998). Her current book project explores the lives of a rural Black family from Sandy Ridge Township in Union County, North Carolina, from enslavement to the present.
Brittney C. Cooper is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she is also the Principal Investigator and Founding Director of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab. Her books include Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, winner of the 2018 Merle Curti Prize for Best Book in U.S. Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians; the New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower; Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood, co-authored with Susana Morris and Chanel Craft Tanner and a Kirkus top Young Adult Book of 2021 as well as a nominee for the Garden State Teen Book Award from the New Jersey Library Association; Stand Up!: 10 Mighty Women Who Made a Change; and The Crunk Feminist Collection, co-edited with Susana Morris and Robin Boylorn. Cooper co-founded the Crunk Feminist Collective, a Hip Hop Generation Feminist Collective of Women of Color Activists and Scholars. They ran the highly successful Crunk Feminist Collective Blog, which was named a top blog by New York magazine in 2011. Today, they co-edit The Remix, a weekly Substack newsletter. Dr. Cooper has also been awarded prizes or been a named finalist for several awards related to her digital commentary. She is currently a contributor at The Cut/New York Magazine, and a former columnist at Salon and Cosmopolitan.com, and a former contributor at Time.com. Dr. Cooper frequently appears as a commentator on MSNBC and NPR, has appeared in several documentaries on Netflix and PBS, and her commentary has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Ebony, Essence, Time, Marie Claire, and many other outlets.
Notes
[1] N.A., “Industrial Education—Will It Solve The Negro Problem,” The Colored American Magazine 7, no. 7 (July 1904): 491.
[2] Fannie Barrier Williams quoted in the Seattle Republican, 26 February 1904, 5; see Wanda A. Hendricks, Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 132.