Chancellor Williams

Chancellor Williams (born December 22, 1898 or 1905 in Bennettsville , South Carolina , † December 7, 1992 ) was an American historian, sociologist and writer.

Life

Williams was born the youngest of five children to an African American family. He became interested in the culture and fate of black people very early on. In his youth he read leading black newspapers such as the Norfolk Journal and Guide or The Crisis, as well as the works of important black authors such as Booker T. Washington and WEB Du Bois . This gave him a perspective on black history that contradicted that in the southern history books written by whites. At the age of 14 he went to Washington to attend high school, which he could not do at home. He enrolled at Howard University in 1925 and graduated in 1930. In 1935 he obtained a master’s degree in history; The subject of his work was "The Socio-Economic Status of Free Blacks in the District of Columbia, 1830-1860". He then worked until 1937 as head of administration of the Cheltenham School for Boys in Maryland and taught at various schools in Washington from 1939-41. From 1941 to 1946 he had various positions with the US federal government, e. B. at the census or price regulator.

At that time he was writing his first book, The Raven , a historical novel about the life of Edgar Allan Poe ; it appeared in 1943. In 1946 a longer essay followed, entitled And If I Were White ; it was a reply to a collection of essays by white authors entitled If I Were a Negro . In September of that year, he returned to Howard University as a lecturer in social sciences. In 1949 he finished his dissertation on the so-called storefront churches , African-American church congregations that held their services in rented shops and warehouses instead of churches due to lack of money and space. For this he received a Ph.D. degree from the American University . In 1952 he processed the topic of his doctoral thesis on the novel Have you been to the River . The main character is Liza Jackson, who, blinded by the preacher's preaching, abandons her husband and children and only realizes her mistake on her deathbed.

Williams spent the next 20 years researching the culture and history of Africa. In 1953/54 he went to Oxford and London as a visiting professor to study the education and culture of black people there. In the late 1950s he went to Ghana in order to conduct extensive studies to trace the origins of African culture before the beginning of European and Asian influence. He published the results of this research in 1961 in the book The Rebirth of African Civilization and returned to Howard University in the same year, where he replaced his former mentor William Leo Hansberry as history professor.

In 1963/64 he went back to Africa and examined the cultures of 105 language groups in 25 countries. This journey led to the creation of his most powerful book, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issuea of ​​a Race from 4500 BC to 2000 AD , published in 1971. In it he explains that Africa is the cradle of human culture and why it is nonetheless a continuous cultural and social decline of the African peoples came. According to Williams, this is because blacks have too much confidence in strangers and because of conflicts among themselves. Based on an overview of the history of Africa, he formulates the demand on blacks to learn from these mistakes, to organize themselves and to regain their position as the leading civilized people.

The study is considered his most important work and has been praised by critics such as Amiri Baraka and John Henrik Clarke and awarded a prize by the Black Academy of Arts. The criticism in the magazine Black Scholar particularly emphasized the comprehensibility of the presentation of historical connections. Negative critics accused Williams, on the other hand, of conveying a simplified, constructed and propagandistic view of history as well as the attempt to artificially increase the academic degree of the work through long footnotes and annotations.

In 1979 Williams' last book was published, now a historical novel again: The Second Agreement with Hell . The main character Steve is a slave freed by the civil war who does not emigrate to the northern states like most of the others. Instead, he tries to build an existence in the south and believes that he can lead a life there as a free, self-confident black man. By introducing real characters into the fictional plot, Williams succeeds in adequately portraying the social and political tensions of the time.

literature

• La Vinia Delois Jennings: Chancellor Williams . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography. 76. Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale 1988, pp. 196-199.
• Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich .: Thomson Gale. 2007.
• Chancellor Williams, 98, Dies; Professor of African History . In: The Washington Post, December 12, 1992. S. B04