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Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race Wanda A. Hendricks. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
This compelling biography of a long-neglected historical figure meets the challenge of fulfilling the interdisciplinary and intersectional mandates of our time. In restoring Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944) to her rightful place as one of the leading black women activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wanda Hendricks enriches our knowledge of the period in myriad ways, useful to scholars in the study of women, African Americans, religion, and history.
Barrier Williams was born in Brockport, New York to parents who were themselves of mixed race, so her very existence challenged rigid racial categories. After graduating from normal school, she went south to teach blacks in postwar Missouri. Here she was shocked by the painful "contradictions" that created "such warmth of welcome on the one hand and so many repelling prejudices on the other" (30). She left the region in a few years for Washington, DC, where she became part of the black elite, recommencing an association with family friend Frederick Douglass.
She married black lawyer S. Laing Williams in 1887. They relocated to Chicago,...