The core idea of the Fannie Barrier Williams Project is to learn more about this significant but underappreciated figure’s life, times, and legacies. We embrace multidisciplinary approaches. We encourage faculty, students, staff, and community partners to connect their own interests to Fannie Barrier Williams’ biography, her historical context, or her multifaceted significance. Fannie Barrier Williams did many things, from political activism to social work to sociology to art and music. While she is not as well known as other activists of her time, her story can sustain many different inquiries. Projects might focus on her personal history or they might probe her historical moment or they could connect to contemporary issues more broadly or to a wider range of perspectives and topics.
Who was Fannie Barrier Williams?
She was born in Western New York in the 1850s and grew up as a free Black American in Brockport. In 1870, she was the first African American woman to graduate from Brockport Normal School, the precursor to SUNY Brockport. An accomplished painter and musician, Barrier Williams went on to live and teach in Washington, DC, Boston, and Hannibal, Missouri before settling with her husband, a successful lawyer, in Chicago, where she led a vibrant career during the Progressive Era fighting for women’s rights and against racism. Among other efforts, she advocated for working-class African American women to professionalize, helped to found settlement houses, broke through the color line of women’s organizations in the city, spoke at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, ghost wrote an autobiography for Booker T. Washington, and interacted with W.E.B Du Bois, Jane Addams, and other famous Americans of her era. Fannie Barrier Williams returned to Brockport in 1926 and was an active member of the community until her death in 1944. Her writings offer a particularly vivid entrance into these struggles. They also link thematically to a wide range of ongoing efforts for diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice in the US and the world beyond her own life and times.
What Can I Do?
For faculty, we invite you to imagine ways that you might “plug in” your coursework (a unit in a class, an entire course, a cross-course collaboration with another instructor or department on campus).
For students, we invite you to pursue curricular and extracurricular avenues of exploration not only into Barrier Williams’ biography and historical context, but also to how her life connects to topics such as contemporary fights for women’s rights, worker’s rights, or against racism today, or to parallel figures in other places and eras, both within the United States and globally, or to her efforts to foster community and equity among diverse participants, or to her training as a musician, artist, and teacher. If interested, Dr. Michael J. Kramer will be offering a course in spring 2024 for these pursuits, the Fannie Barrier Williams Project (HST/AAS/WGS 381), open to undergraduate and graduate students.
For staff, we invite you to propose creative ways of linking your office, unit, or work at SUNY Brockport to the powerful legacies of Fannie Barrier Williams.
For community partners, we are keen to connect the project to your interests and goals.
Reading Group
To deepen our understanding of Fannie Barrier Williams and her significance, our project begins with something in which we hope you might enjoy participating: a reading group! We believe it is an activity that Fannie Barrier Williams herself, with her commitment to education, would have valued. The FBW Project will sponsor a series of reading group gatherings (in person and online, on campus and in collaboration with local history institutions) to discuss essays written by Fannie Barrier Williams, contextualizing them historically and exploring their continued relevance. Books as well as online access to the essays and writings by FBW will be provided.
If interested, faculty members, students, and staff members are heartily welcome to contact FBW Project Co-Director Dr. Michael J. Kramer in the History Department with ideas or questions, mkramer@brockport.edu.
