- A lifelong African American activist, Fannie Barrier Williams made history as a controversial reformer and writer in an era fraught with racial discrimination and injustice. Williams first came to prominence when protesting the exclusion of African American women from the 1893 Columbian Exposition and later worked in support of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. In her speeches, essays, and articles, Williams argued for an interracial worldview - a third way that involved neither accommodationism nor rejectionism. Committed to aiding and educating Chicago's urban poor, Williams played...