Historian George Washington Williams died in the English coastal town of Blackpool in 1891, frustrated at a moral, political, and social catastrophe he had witnessed, one that would alter the Black radical tradition for good. Williams discovered, in his trips in the Belgian Congo, a problem that had not yet been named: imperialism. It was barbarism and cruelty thought to have been extinguished with the abolition of slavery. The “free state” of Congo was put to work for King Leopold II of Belgium. Children and old men had their hands cut off for the slightest infractions, an indigenous force founded by the king (the notorious Force Publique) could, without reservation, destroy whole villages if they refused to work. All subjects of the Free State of Congo were forced to extract rubber from rubber figs. Only free in name, every Congolese citizen was effectively still a slave. Everybody was forced, with a labor tax by Leopold.
When George Washington Williams saw this suffering up close, it was as if he was looking into a mirror, a mirror that showed a bygone age he risked his life to abolish. It looked like chattel slavery.
Empire was as old as hierarchical society itself. Settler colonialism was seen as a solution to the “social problem” of unruly unemployed workers at home in Europe. Steamships took settlers to European-carved “protectorates” to start life anew. In struggles for land and labor, racial segregation, backed by the powerful imperialist state, would soon follow. The barbarisms that were being reported, from the Nama and Herero genocides in present-day Namibia by the Germans to the concentration camps in South Africa by the English to the war crimes by the US in the Philippines, spurred a global movement which called itself “anti-imperialism.”
Williams, however, died before this movement began to take shape. He died before people identified as anti-imperialists, before the American novelist Mark Twain and his contemporaries founded the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1898. He died before the English social scientist J. A. Hobson wrote his influential study, Imperialism: A Study (1902), after witnessing horrors in the Second Boer War in South Africa in 1903.
Williams was a deeply Christian man. He was trained in theology and believed that God directly ruled the affairs of humanity. In his worldview, God tested the patience of humanity but ultimately pushed world affairs toward the arc of justice. The American civil war, which he ran away from home to join at the young age of fourteen, seemed to prove to Williams that behind the Union army—and the end of American slavery—there worked a divine hand. And there was good reason for his optimism: his own life story.
We would have never learned about Williams were it not for a graduate student in 1946, John Hope Franklin, uncovering his comprehensive history of Black America, one of the first of its kind.