Henry Sylvester Williams

Henry Sylvester Williams was born in Arouca, Trinidad, on the fifteenth of February 1869, the son of Henry Bishop Williams, a wheelwright. A gifted pupil, he began his working life as a schoolteacher before his hunger for the law carried him across the Atlantic, studying briefly in Halifax at Dalhousie University and then in London at King's College. In 1897 he enrolled as a student of Gray's Inn to read for the bar, and it was there, in 1902, that he was at last called to the Bar.

That same restless conscience made him an organizer as much as an advocate. With Alice Kinloch and Thomas Josiah Thompson he founded the African Association in 1897, a body pledged to promote and protect the interests of all peoples claiming African descent. From it grew his most enduring act: the first Pan-African Conference, convened at Westminster Town Hall in London from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth of July 1900, where W. E. B. Du Bois gave voice to the century's great question of the colour line.

Williams then carried the struggle to new grounds. In 1903 he was admitted to the bar of the Cape Colony, the first Black man to practise there, defending African clients against a hostile legal establishment. Returning to Britain, in November 1906 he was elected to the Marylebone Borough Council, among the earliest people of African descent to hold public office in England.

In 1908 he came home to Trinidad and rejoined its bar, practising until his death in Port of Spain on the twenty-sixth of March 1911, at only forty-two. He lit the first flame of Pan-African unity, and that flame has never gone out.