Arsania M. Williams (1875?–1954)

Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, around 1875—sources differ on the year of her birth—Arsania M. Williams was the third of five children of George and Julia Williams. Seeking the perceived greater financial opportunities of the North for African Americans, the family moved to St. Louis before Williams was one year old. She was educated in the segregated St. Louis public school system and earned a teaching certificate from the Sumner Normal School in 1895. Her first teaching position was at Dumas Elementary School. Later, she taught at L’Ouverture, Simmons, and Marshall Schools in St. Louis. At her retirement she was head assistant for the John Marshall School.

Williams’s keen intelligence and strong personality quickly drew the attention of leaders of both the African American and the white communities in St. Louis. She enjoyed highly public roles and was a recognized Black leader in secular and religious education and community affairs. Williams was the only woman on the committee that organized “Negro Day” at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Part of the Black community’s effort to stimulate improved race relations, “Negro Day” highlighted activities of African Americans such as George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington. In 1908 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sent twelve local schoolchildren to the presidential inauguration of William Taft; the newspaper selected Williams as a chaperone for the Black children. She was the first African American selected by the St. Louis Christmas Carol Association to direct activities in Black neighborhoods.

A strong proponent of using the system to improve race relations, Williams used examples and effective organizations to soften segregation. Typical of strong female leaders of the period, she worked through women’s clubs and behind the scenes of male-dominated organizations such as the St. Louis Urban League. Active in the St. Louis club-woman movement, Williams founded the Young Ladies Reading Club and the Help-A-Lot Club under the St. Louis Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1910. She also cofounded the Phillis Wheatley branch of the St. Louis YWCA in 1911. She believed strongly in the ideals of the YWCA, and helped organize the Wheatley branch because segregation kept young Black women from membership in existing chapters. Williams served on the board of directors and later as president of the Phillis Wheatley branch, St. Louis’s first black YWCA. Later, she served as president of the St. Louis Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and the Missouri Association of Colored Women’s Clubs from 1924 to 1926. She was vice president at large of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs from 1938 to 1940. The St. Louis association, like the state and national associations, promoted education, cooperation, and economic opportunity for African Americans.

Secular and religious education were Williams’s driving passions. She organized the St. Louis Negro Grade School Teachers’ Association in 1917, and in 1930 the Missouri Association of Negro Teachers elected her as its president. Equally committed to religious education, Williams organized and served as dean of the St. Louis Standard Leadership Training School at the Union Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church in 1922, the first school of its kind in St. Louis devoted to training church-school and religious leaders.

In 1938 Douglass University in St. Louis awarded Williams an honorary master of arts degree. Arsania M. Williams died in St. Louis at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, a segregated hospital, on March 24, 1954.