Born in Brockport, New York, on February 12, 1855, Fannie Barrier attended public schools and in 1870 graduated from the local State Normal School (now the State University of New York College at Brockport). During her succeeding years as a teacher in freedmen╒s schools at various places in the South and in Washington, D.C., she first encountered overt racial prejudice. Later she studied for periods at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and at the School of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. In 1887 she married S. Laing Williams, a lawyer with whom she settled in Chicago. While helping her husband establish his practice (at one time he was a partner of Ferdinand Barnett, husband of Ida Wells-Barnett) she became active in civic affairs as well.
She helped organize Provident Hospital and its Training School for Nurses, both interracial institutions, in 1891. In May 1893 she gave an address on ╥The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation╙ to the World╒s Congress of Representative Women (held in conjunction with the World╒s Columbian Exposition). In September she addressed the World╒s Parliament of Religions. Between them the two public appearances brought her national recognition, and for a decade or more afterward she was widely in demand as a lecturer. Also in 1893 she helped found the National League of Colored Women, and she remained a leader in its successor, the National Association of Colored Women.
In 1894 Williams was proposed for membership in the prestigious Chicago Woman╒s Club. Debate within the club over the question verged on acrimony and lasted more than a year; one of her stoutest supporters was Dr. Sarah Stevenson. In 1895 she became the club╒s first African-American member. She wrote regularly for the Chicago Record-Herald and the New York Age and worked quietly in many ways to open new opportunities to black women. From 1900 she became an outspoken supporter of Booker T. Washington╒s program of accommodation and self-improvement. Perhaps not coincidentally, Washington used his considerable influence to secure an appointment for Laing Williams as an assistant U.S. district attorney in 1908. In 1924 the widowed Williams became the first woman and the first African-American to be named to the Chicago Library Board. In 1926 she returned to her native Brockport, New York, where she died on March 4, 1944.
