Who was Henry Sylvester Williams?

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Henry Sylvester Williams was the Caribbean lawyer who gave Pan-Africanism its first meeting.

Who he was

Henry Sylvester Williams (c. 1869–1911) was raised in Arouca, Trinidad. Sources disagree on his birth: some give 1869 in Trinidad, others 1867 in Barbados. He taught school from the age of 17, left in 1891 for New York, studied law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, then moved to London and enrolled at Gray’s Inn in 1897. That same year he co-founded the African Association with Alice Kinloch and Thomas Josiah Thompson.

A life in six dates

• 1900: Convenes the first Pan-African Conference at Westminster Town Hall, London.
• 1901: Publishes a monthly, The Pan-African. It lasts only a few issues.
• 1903: Becomes the first Black man admitted to the bar of the Cape Colony, in South Africa.
• 1906: Wins a seat on Marylebone Borough Council. With John Archer, he is among the first people of African descent elected to office in Britain.
• 1908: Visits Liberia at President Arthur Barclay’s invitation, then returns to practice law in Trinidad.
• 1911: Dies in March, in his early forties. He is buried in Port of Spain.

Why he matters

Williams built an association, a conference and a journal within four years. The 1900 conference brought together delegates from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, and W.E.B. Du Bois carried that work into the congresses that followed.

The ADC connection

Williams worked in London at the turn of the 20th century, at the epicenter of Black intellectualism in the empire. The Black African diaspora was present there, yet compartmentalized: students, lawyers and activists from Africa and the Caribbean shared a city without a cohesive discourse among fellows that could lead to solutions. His goal was to build that discourse. ADC begins from the same goal: to bring Africa and its diaspora into one conversation, and to keep it going.

Photo: Ernest Herbert Mills, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).