Telling the story of the Brockport-born, Progressive Era African American activist.
Dr. Anne Macpherson spoke about the life and career of Fannie Barrier Williams, the Brockport-born Progressive Era women’s and civil rights activist, at SUNY Brockport on Tuesday, August 20th, 2024 to celebrate the unveiling of artist Olivia Kim’s sculpture of Williams, now located in the lobby of the Fannie Barrier Williams Liberal Arts Building. Williams was born in Brockport, was the first African American graduate of the Brockport Normal School (precursor to SUNY Brockport) and lived her last decades in the town after a long career of activism in Washington DC and Chicago. Dr. Macpherson’s speech is republished below. For more about Williams, see the Fannie Barrier Williams Project, initiated by the SUNY Brockport Department of History.
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the Fannie Barrier Williams Building here on the SUNY Brockport campus. I am Anne Macpherson, Professor in the Department of History, and I am thrilled to open today’s celebration of Olivia Kim’s bust of Fannie Barrier Williams.
Fannie Barrier was born in Brockport in 1855 to a businessman father who worked hard to ensure that he had enough property to qualify to vote as an African-American man in New York State. She graduated from the Brockport State Normal and Training School in 1870 as its first African-American graduate. She decided to venture south to teach the children of the formerly enslaved in the segregated school systems of Missouri and Washington DC. Here her identity as a Black woman developed and her commitment to the communities of African-Americans, women, and African-American women grew. After her marriage to lawyer Samuel Laing Williams, she embarked on a new career as a social reform organizer and activist in Chicago for labor, civil, voting, and women’s rights. She became a nationally-recognized writer and speaker with a strong focus on the rights and wellbeing of African American women. She engaged in these struggles in the post-Reconstruction era of rising violent racism by bonding with other elite Black women and by building alliances across the lines of race and gender- but not class. She claimed the time and space to be heard—notably at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago where she spoke on “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation”. Her activism shaped the progressive movements that battled against Jim Crow and the deep class, race, and gender inequalities of industrialization and the gilded age.
She studied at SUNY Brockport’s precursor institution from 1868-70, a period bracketed by the 14th Amendment that restored US citizenship to African-Americans and extended voting rights to African-American men, and by the 15th Amendment that sought to counter the denial of those voting rights by many states. At the Brockport Normal School she studied grammar, composition, and literature, history and geography, modern languages and rhetoric, logic and philosophy, the fine arts, and geometry, algebra, trigonometry and astronomy. Later in life she argued for the relevance of this wide sweep of the liberal arts and sciences to the intellectual and creative nature of all forms of labor, and thus for all students to have access to them.
When I was chair of History it was heartening to discover that campus administrators were already thinking that the new Liberal Arts Building should be named for Barrier Williams. With the support of the chairs from all academic departments then housed in LAB—including Philosophy and Modern Languages and Cultures—they secured SUNY’s approval two years ago. For the facilities staff and office staff, the Deans, and faculty located in the building since then, the naming has given a deeper sense of pride and meaning to our work with students. Now with the arrival of African and African-American Studies, Sociology, and Political Science and International Studies to join Anthropology, English and Composition, History, and Women and Gender Studies under this roof, the bust makes manifest the connection between this building as one key hub of the liberal arts and sciences on campus and Fannie Barrier Williams as a key person in SUNY Brockport’s history and identity.
I think she would have been particularly pleased and amazed that the vital disciplines of African and African-American Studies and Women and Gender Studies exist and are housed in her building. As a talented and trained artist herself, someone who suffered some of the most biting racial discrimination of her life at art school in Boston, I think she would also be particularly pleased to be recognized with a piece of art, especially one created by a woman artist of color, especially one who has created statues of Frederick Douglass, with whom Barrier Williams collaborated for decades in Washington and Chicago and who she first met when she was a little girl growing up on Erie Street in Brockport.
— Dr. Anne Macpherson, Professor of History, SUNY Brockport
