Emily A. Harper (A.B. 1896) was beyond excited. It was her first week as a U-M student, and as she walked across campus, she bumped into President James B. Angell, who called her by name. The university president had singled her out in a sea of first-year students.
She later had a humbling epiphany about their encounter.
“Poor innocent,” she said, “it was not till years later that I realized that perhaps it was not difficult to remember the name of the one brown girl in a group of several hundred new students.”
Emily Harper Williams (as she came to be known after marriage) would go on to be remembered for her lifelong dedication to educating and elevating African Americans—particularly women—at a time when racial segregation and discrimination were rampant in the United States.
After graduating from U-M with a Latin degree, Williams taught Black high school students in Washington, D.C. She supplemented her income by spending summers at Virginia’s Hampton Institute (now University), where she and others taught hundreds of African American teachers from segregated schools.
“The majority of these teachers are working where the Negro problem most needs to be solved, in the country schools of the South,” Williams wrote in The Colored American Magazine. “For inspiration and help in this work of uplifting the race, they sacrificed a month of their vacation and came to the Hampton Summer Normal.”
It was in Virginia where she met her future husband, William T.B. Williams, a graduate of Hampton and Harvard who had returned to his alma mater. (When Emily Williams was preparing to attend the 30th reunion of her LSA class, she wrote: “I wish my husband had time to go with me. I went with him to his 25th class reunion at Harvard, and I would like to show him that the Michigan alumni are just as fine as those of Harvard.”)
The couple remained in Virginia until 1919, when they moved to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute (now University), where she taught English.
Throughout her career, Williams threw herself into organizations aimed at improving the economic and social status of Black women, including the National Association of Colored Women, the National Protective League for Negro Girls, and the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. She worked alongside—and impressed—the leading African American women of the day: Margaret Murray Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Mary Church Terrell. “We are a band of women, though small, working with every other group of women to bring about the thing for which we all stand: justice and fair play for every woman in the land,” Washington said of the International Council.
Williams died in 1933. “The death of Emily Williams has brought a great loss to our club work,” Bethune wrote. “She was a good worker.”
Williams’s headstone in the Tuskegee campus cemetery speaks to her radiance:
A perfect Woman,nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.
Photo illustrations by Carly Parker and Becky Sehenuk Waite
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