Frontispiece to “History of the Negro Race in America,” Published 1885
George Washington Williams was one complex dude. He was a soldier, a minister of the gospel, a lawyer, a politician, an investigative journalist, a historian and a social activist. A modern historian called him a charmer. His brief life was turbulent, to say the least. The three years he spent in Cincinnati were typical of his tempestuous career.
Williams arrived in Cincinnati in March 1876 to assume the pastorship of the Union Baptist Church, the city’s oldest African American Baptist congregation, then located on Mound Street, north of Ninth. The previous pastor had been eased out of the pulpit for rather eccentric tirades and Williams was recruited to steer the congregation back to a steady course.
By the time Williams arrived in Cincinnati, he had lived a very full life that seemed impossible given his youth. Although only 27 years old, he had fought in the Civil War, enlisted as a mercenary in the insurrection to depose Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian and was later posted to the American West as one of the Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry. Discharged for medical reasons and barely literate, he enrolled at a seminary in Boston and emerged five years later as an electrifying speaker and an impressive prose stylist.
At graduation he was named pastor of Boston’s Twelfth Baptist Church, a post he abandoned after a single year. Relocating to Washington DC, Williams unsuccessfully attempted to launch a national newspaper for African Americans. He was working as a postal clerk when the Union Baptist Church called. In Cincinnati, Williams quickly earned a reputation as a young man with a future. According to historian John Hope Franklin:
“He almost immediately became prominent. He was an extrovert, good-looking, with a beautiful voice. He was a charmer.”
Williams’ popularity extended into Cincinnati’s white community. He became good friends with yeast manufacturer Charles Fleischmann who employed Williams as his personal secretary. He passed the bar after studying law in the offices of Alphonso Taft. The Cincinnati Commercial, the only local paper at that time to occasionally print favorable articles about the local Black community, hired Williams as a columnist. He wrote under the pseudonym “Aristedes.”
The membership of Union Baptist Church, familiar with a very different style of ministry, warmed only gradually to their new pastor. According to the Cincinnati Commercial [September 6, 1876]:
“They had been accustomed to red-hot exhortations of the old-fashioned camp meeting stamp, interspersed with slang, and emphasized by violent stamping and shouting—to the declamatory efforts of unlettered preachers—to barbarous interpretations of outlandish texts—to everything characteristic of early negro church worship. Here, on the other hand, was a young man, scholarly, dignified, unostentatiously pious, who preached to them with some choice of words, some oratorical ability, and real knowledge of something better than mere ’emotional religion.'”
From Wendell Dabney’s “Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens” Page 369, Published 1926
So charismatic and yet so innovative was Williams that his own congregation was split down the middle, with one faction urging him to enter the political arena and another faction gathering votes to send him packing. Williams responded in an open letter denying any interest in politics mostly because, while supporting the overall racial platform of the Republican Party, he was unhappy with the scant effort that party had actually exerted to improve conditions for African Americans.
The seed, however, had been planted, and Williams campaigned in 1877 for a seat in the Ohio General Assembly. He lost that election but ran again two years later. The campaign of 1879 was—as was normal for elections at that time—vicious and nasty. The virulently racist Cincinnati Gazette editorialized against Williams, citing a menagerie of unfounded rumors. The far more supportive Cincinnati Commercial offered a point-by-point defense of their columnist. Williams prevailed and took his seat in January 1880 as the first African American ever elected to the Ohio legislature.
His historic election to statewide office did nothing to remove the racial barriers in place at the time. Williams learned that most legislators took their meals—and conducted business—at Beck’s restaurant across the street from the State Capitol in Columbus, but that restaurant adamantly refused to serve a Black man, elected or not. Although some Cincinnatians scoffed at the racism in the state capital, the Cincinnati Commercial interviewed an African American barber on Fourth Street who confirmed that Williams would also be denied service in most Cincinnati tonsorial parlors.
Just months after taking his seat in the General Assembly, Williams’ political star plummeted to the ground when he introduced a bill that would have closed the Colored American Cemetery in Avondale. That burying ground, purchased in 1853 when Avondale was quite rural, was now surrounded by the country estates of some of Cincinnati’s wealthiest white men. To the dismay of the African American community, the bill would have had no effect on the German Protestant Cemetery next door. At a meeting convened at Allen Temple, the leaders of Cincinnati’s Black community railed against the new representative. The Cincinnati Commercial [April 13, 1880] quoted several speakers. William Alexander, Court House custodian, was typical of their tone:
“George W. Williams, in my judgement, is not the man to represent the colored people of Hamilton County; never did I believe it from the time he was nominated in that large Convention. I would be glad to have some way that he could be dislodged from the position he now occupies.”
Williams took the hint. He did not stand for reelection and moved out of Cincinnati at the conclusion of his only term in office. After leaving Cincinnati, Williams achieved his greatest successes. He published two landmark books: a history of Black soldiers in the Civil War and a history of African Americans from 1619 to 1880. Both received exceptional reviews, even in the white press. Based on information received at an international anti-slavery conference, Williams traveled to the Belgian Congo and wrote a scathing exposé on the deplorable conditions of that colony, employing, it is believed, the first usage of the term “crimes against humanity” to describe the atrocities committed in the name of King Leopold.
Controversy followed Williams around the world. Among other shortcomings, he stiffed the British Museum for costs incurred during his research and he was unfaithful to his wife. Williams died from tuberculosis, penniless in England, aged 41, and was buried in an unmarked grave. At the Ohio Statehouse today, a modern painting and a bronze bust memorialize his brief career in Cincinnati politics.
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