Wanda A. Hendricks. Fannie Barrier Williams

Fannie Barrier Williams traveled first-class on trains in the Jim Crow South. Light skin allowed this well-educated woman of color to surreptitiously claim the privilege her financial resources afforded. A commitment to racial advancement inspired Barrier Williams to write about this experience and openly traverse boundaries that white northerners also imposed. This Chicago-based reformer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved local and national prominence as a spokesperson for black female progress and as a founder of important institutions. She might be considered a civil rights pioneer if not for the fact that so few had the opportunity to follow in her footsteps, less because of the limitations of her elitist perspective than because of the racist animosities of her times. Wanda A. Hendricks's well-researched biography recovers what is unique and what is representative about this woman's thought-provoking journey. Fannie Barrier Williams's formative years and personal circumstances shaped her understanding of race as a subjective phenomenon imposed by circumstance. In the upstate New York canal town of Brockport, her two mixed-raced parents acquired ample property and provided for their daughter's college education. The racism that Barrier Williams subsequently encountered in places as diverse as Missouri and Massachusetts did little to shake her sense of accomplishment and refinement, while family friendship with Frederick Douglass and marriage to aspiring attorney Samuel Laing Williams further secured her place at the nexus of elite black society first in Washington, D.C., where she taught school, and then in Chicago, a city where prodigious economic and cultural energy rewarded many ambitious transplants in the late nineteenth century. The author labels the Williams's class position as aristocratic; in actuality, they were members of a small but energetic northern black professional bourgeoisie.

Art history · Biography · Political science · Privilege (computing) · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies