Joseph Williams is an Assistant Professor of History & Africana Studies at Lehigh University. His research interests lie at the intersection of African American history, women’s and gender history, and US religious history. Joseph’s research interests lie at the intersection of African American history, Black intellectual history, Black women’s history, and the history of American religious reform. He is currently at work on a monograph that examines how Black women active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forged an intellectual movement steeped in religious thought, and the ways in which their ideas influenced campaigns for racial and gender reform.
Prior to joining Lehigh, he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Richards Civil War Era Center and the Africana Research Center at Penn State University. Joseph joined Lehigh University in the fall of 2023 after completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Richards Civil War Era Center and the Africana Research Center at Penn State University.
Joseph also established and runs The Eulogy Project, a digital humanities initiative and online repository dedicated to the curation of Black memorials produced across time and space.
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Recent Publications
- Williams, Joseph. Review of “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America” by Anthea Butler (University of North Carolina Press, 2021); in Journal of African American History (Spring 2023).
- Williams, Joseph. “‘Tell It Like It Is:’ The Rise of a Race-Conscious Professoriate at Rutgers in the 1960s,” in Scarlet and Black Volume III: Making Black Lives Matter at Rutgers, 1945-2020, eds. Miya Carey, Marisa Fuentes, and Deborah Gray White (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, Press. 2021).
- Williams, Joseph. “All the World’s A Classroom: The First Black Students at Rutgers College and New Brunswick Theological Seminary Encounter Racial Ideology, Missionary Impulses and the Intellectual Life of the University,” in Scarlet and Black Volume II: Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, eds.
In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought, interviews Joseph Williams, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, about his article in the first issue of Global Black Thought, “Three Days in Boston: Nineteenth Century Black Women’s Intellectual Activism and the Case of John W.
Read also: A Journey of Faith and History
Black Clubwomen and Intellectual Activism
Ashley Everson: Your article meticulously recovers the intellectual labor of Black clubwomen in the 1895 Boston conference. Joseph Williams: I initially encountered Black clubwomen’s response to John Jacks a little over ten years ago while reading the Woman’s Era where Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin offered the first rebuttal to his attacks and summoned her fellow clubwomen toward a national gathering. In assessing the convention minutes for a separate project, I noticed a dialectic unfolding among Black women in response to the letter.
While they almost unanimously rallied against Jacks’s claims, they did so with extensive deliberations over gender, race, and class. They also considered the nature and role of truth in their larger campaign for racial uplift.
Everson: You present a range of responses to the infamous Jacks letter, from rhetorical restraint to public denunciation. Williams: In one instance, I see that tension as a part of Black women’s attempt to self-actualize-to make sense of and embrace themselves in a dehumanizing society.
Yet the tension also advanced a conversation about Black womanhood crucial to clubwomen’s maneuvering of the letter and their conference preparations. What tone will the convention set? Who will speak? What will the speakers say? What outside groups should be allowed?
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Everson: The Woman’s Era periodical plays a central role in your narrative. Williams: Unlike some mediums produced by a lone voice (e.g., speeches, poems, single-authored monographs, etc.), newspapers and magazines provide a more discursively rich platform that I see as critical to nineteenth-century Black feminist thought.
Sure, all periodicals come with a certain cultural or political bent; and editorial authority exists. Yet the potential for the type of discourse that emerges in the case of Black clubwomen’s intellectual rejoinders to Jacks existed in part because the Era‘s editors welcomed a conversation about the letter, Black women responded, and Ruffin printed their commentary.
Williams: Some of the women I discuss are unnamed or only contribute a few sentences to the discussion on Jacks. I therefore struggled with contextualizing their contributions because I either could not trace their identity or did not have enough material to substantially frame their intervention. I, of course, mostly encountered this problem with lesser-known intellectuals as I sought to include their voices in the project.
Everson: You show how the letter’s misogynist violence mobilized a counter-discourse of Black womanhood. Williams: One of the strategies Black clubwomen employed involved fact-checking the claims central to Jacks’s letter. As AI becomes a common medium for the dissemination of ideas, it’s important for us to constantly fact-check what we see and hear. It’s also worth bearing in mind the legacy of Black women’s intellectual activism in concert with their communal labor.
Ruffin and her contemporaries valued ideological resistance beyond discourse. Of equal importance is the power of the Black community to guard Black narratives, an effort almost certainly bolstered by the ability of Black people to establish and control their own knowledge-producing institutions.
Read also: "Joseph: King of Dreams" and "Spirit"
Everson: Your work highlights both the complexity and fragility of Black women’s public self-definition. Williams: I learned early in the project that the perspectives and ideas of Black intellectuals are shaped as much by the conversations they have with one another as it is by the conversations they have with members of an outside group. It’s important, then, for historians to avoid an exclusive juxtaposition of Black intellectuals with thinkers from the dominant tradition. Otherwise, historians might not fully grasp the diversity and complexity of Black thought.
Joseph J. Williams and His Ethnological Collection
Anansi and the Melon | Folktales | Stories for Kids | Bedtime Stories
The Joseph J. Williams, SJ ethnological collection documents the research interests of Williams, a Jesuit priest who studied the history and culture of the Caribbean and Africa. The Joseph J. Williams, SJ ethnological collection is arranged into four series: I. Anansi stories, II. Anthropology manuscripts, III. Collected Caribbeana, and IV. Collected Africana.
Series II is further arranged into two subseries: A. By Williams and B. By others. Series III. is arranged into nine subseries: A. Broadsides, B. Correspondence, C. Finance, D. Illustrations, E. Newspapers, F. Religious, G. Reports, H. Shipping, and I. Wills and estates. Series IV is arranged into two subseries: A. Illustrations, and B. Manuscripts.
Portions of this collection are available digitally. Published works associated with this collection have been transferred within the Burns Library and can be found in the Boston College Library catalog. The name of the folk character Anansi has multiple spellings. We have used the spelling "Anansi" in our description because it is the Library of Congress authorized form. The spelling "Anancy" is also common in the Caribbean, and that spelling is frequently found on the materials in this collection. Many materials in this collection have manuscript numbers believed to have been assigned by Williams.
Joseph J. Williams, SJ was born on December 1, 1875, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Nicholas and Mary Jane Williams. Williams attended Boston College High School, the College of St. Francis Xavier, Woodstock College, and Loyola School, New York and became a member of the Society of Jesus in 1895. In 1907 he was ordained.
In 1912 Williams traveled to Jamaica as a missionary. This appointment proved influential to him, as he became fascinated by anthropology and Jamaican and African folklore and cultural beliefs. He spent five years in the country, years which laid the groundwork for his future studies.
Williams returned to the United States in 1918, working at Woodstock College and College of the Holy Cross. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published a number of scholarly works concerning African and Caribbean history and belief systems, including Whisperings of the Caribbean (1925), Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica (1930), Hebrewisms of West Africa (1930), and Voodoo and Obeah in Jamaica (1932).
In 1930, he launched a contest encouraging Jamaican school children to submit stories about the trickster character Anansi.
In the early 1930s he became a lecturer in anthropology at Boston College. Williams intended to travel to Africa to research his next project in the mid-1930s, but he became ill and spent the next few years bedridden, before dying on October 28, 1940 from a heart attack.
Hebrewisms of West Africa
In this massive work, Joseph J. Williams documents the Hebraic practices, customs, and beliefs, which he found among the people of Jamaica and the Ashanti of West Africa. He initially examines the close relationship between the Jamaican and the Ashanti cultures and the folk beliefs. He then studies the language and culture of the Ashanti (of whom many Jamaicans have descended) by comparing them to well-known and established Hebraic traditions.
William’s findings suggest stunning similarities. While Williams presents a strong case, his evidence, including hundreds of quoted sources, also builds a strong case for the reverse-that an indigenous, continent-wide belief system among African people stands at the very root of Hebrew culture and Western religion.
First published in 1931 and long out-of-print, today’s reader will find Hebrewisms a valuable resource for understanding the cultural unity of African people.
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