Henry Sylvester Williams

Henry Sylvester Williams was born in Arouca, Trinidad, on the fifteenth of February 1869, the son of a wheelwright. He took his law training at King's College London and was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn in 1897 — among the first Black barristers in England.

In 1897 he founded the African Association in London. In July 1900 he convened the African Association's first conference at Westminster Town Hall — the conference that called itself the Pan-African Conference, the first political meeting in history to use that adjective. Thirty-seven delegates attended; W. E. B. Du Bois, who would convene six subsequent Pan-African Congresses, delivered his address To the Nations of the World — in which the phrase "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" first appeared in print.

The 1900 conference is the formal founding moment of the Pan-African movement. Williams convened it; he framed its resolutions; he set its trajectory. The Pan-Africanism of Du Bois, Garvey, Padmore, Nkrumah, Cabral, and every Pan-African Congress through 1974 descends from the meeting he organized.

He continued his legal practice — he was the first Black person ever to defend a case before the British Privy Council, and the first Black person elected to a borough council in England (Marylebone, 1906) — until his return to Trinidad in 1908. He resumed legal practice in Port of Spain.

He died in Trinidad on the twenty-sixth of March 1911, age forty-two.

He is honored here as the barrister who convened the first Pan-African Conference and gave the movement its name.