Williams, Edward Christopher 1871-1929

views updated

WILLIAMS, Edward Christopher 1871-1929

(Bertuccio Dantino)

PERSONAL:

Born 1871, in Cleveland, OH; died December 24, 1929, in Washington, DC; son of Daniel P. and Mary Kilkary Williams; married Ethel Chesnutt; children: Charles. Education: Adelbert College, Western Reserve University, B.A., 1892; attended New York State Library School and Columbia University.

CAREER:

Librarian, writer, and educator. Adelbert College, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, assistant librarian, 1892-94, librarian, 1894-98, university librarian, 1898-99, teacher at Western Reserve University Library School, 1904; M Street School (later Dunbar High School), principal, c. 1907-16; Howard University, Washington, DC, professor of bibliography, directory of library training, and librarian, 1916-21, head of Romance languages department, 1921-29. Served on summer staff of New York Public Library, 135th Street Branch, 1921-29.

MEMBER:

Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Roosevelt fellowship, 1929-30.

WRITINGS:

When Washington Was in Vogue: A Love Story (novel; originally serialized as Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair in Messenger, 1925-26), Amistad (New York, NY), 2004.

Author of A Sketch of the History and Present Condition of the Library of Adelbert College, 1901. Associate faculty editor of Howard University Record. Author of plays, including The Exile, The Sheriff's Children, and The Chasm. Also published poems and short stories anonymously and under pseudonyms, reportely under the name Bertuccio Dantino.

SIDELIGHTS:

Born in 1871, Edward Christopher Williams was a writer, teacher, developer, and advocate of education for librarians. Following a distinguished academic career at Western Reserve University's Adelbert College, where he served as valedictorian and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Williams attended the New York State Library School. There, he earned the historic distinction of being the first African American to graduate from a library school and thus, the first professionally trained black librarian. Williams founded the Ohio Library Association and served in a variety of librarian posts at Western Reserve until 1900 and taught there in 1904. He also taught and served as librarian at Howard University from 1916 to 1921, and as head of the Romance languages department there from 1921 until his sudden death in 1929.

In addition to his professional teaching and librarianship accomplishments, Williams is known for a landmark epistolary novel, When Washington Was in Vogue: A Love Story. The novel originally appeared in serial form in Messenger as Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair, in 1925 and 1926. "The letters were a trove of social observation and commentary, wrapped inside a coy and charming love story," remarked Nick Poppy in the Boston Globe. The book is presented as missives from Davy Carr, a scholar and World War I veteran living in Washington, D.C., to his friend and army colleague Bob Fletcher in Harlem. Carr relates how he travels to Washington to research a book on the slave trade and gradually falls for his landlady's daughter, Caroline Rhodes. Carr meets his landlady's intellectual, well-to-do friends and interacts with a circle of high-society African Americans in Washington. He relates how skin tone was considered significant even among the black bourgeoisie with whom he associated, with the more favorable treatment reserved for light-skinned persons—Williams himself was a light-skinned African American who refused to portray himself as white. Carr identifies cultural and racial divisions "not only between black and white but also between black and black," noted Mark Gauvreau Judge in Wall Street Journal. "That is, between 'bourgeois blacks'—those who considered themselves doyens of traditional culture, taste, and learning—and lower-class blacks: manual workers, servants, flapper girls, and jazz hounds." Carr also reports to Fletcher on the developing romance between himself and the dark-skinned Caroline, how he gradually evolves from blithe unawareness of her affection for him and his feelings for her to their fully, delightedly aware romance.

Williams's story was forgotten for decades until it was rescued from obscurity by Adam McKible, a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Poppy remarked that "the story Williams tells in When Washington Was in Vogue reminds us that the flourishing of African American arts and letters in the early decades of the twentieth century was not confined to Harlem." The book "offers a welcome and consistently entertaining glimpse of a pivotal era in our recent past," commented Jabari Asim in Crisis. A Publishers Weekly contributor concluded that When Washington Was in Vogue "is slight in plot but deep in detail, an invaluable addition to period scholarship."