Fannie Barrier Williams - Biography

Biography

Frances (Fannie) Barrier was the youngest of three children born to Anthony and Harriet Barrier. Her father, born in Pennsylvania, came to Brockport, New York as a child. He claimed to be partially of French descent. He worked as a barber and later became a coal dealer. Her mother Harriet was born in Chenango, New York and the couple married in Brockport. The family attended the First Baptist Church in Brockport, and was the only black family in the congregation. Fannie recalled her Brockport youth as a time of innocence, but her personal experience and growing awareness of the unfair treatment received by women of color led her to pursue a lifetime of activism.

All three Barrier children attended Brockport public schools. After graduation, Fannie Barrier went on to the Brockport Normal School, a teachers college (now SUNY Brockport), and was the first black to graduate in 1870. After graduation, Fannie Barrier went to the Washington D.C. area to teach joining the emerging education movement which focused on freedmen and freedwomen. She reported that she was "shattered" by the discrimination she encountered in the more southern city. She also experienced significant difficulties due to her race when she enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Washington to study portrait painting, and had a similar experience when she attempted to study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

While teaching in Washington, D.C., she met her future husband S. Laing Williams of Georgia. He worked in the United States Pension Office while studying law at Columbian University (later George Washington University Law School). They were married in Brockport in August 1887, returned to Washington, and eventually settled in Chicago, Illinois where Williams was admitted to the Illinois bar and began a successful law practice. The couple joined All Souls (Unitarian) Church in Chicago.

After the death of her husband in 1921, Barrier Williams remained in Chicago until 1926, when she returned to Brockport to live with her sister. She continued to advocate for African-American women until her death in 1944.