“Completely Surrounded by Screens”

This chapter examines Fannie Barrier Williams' move to Jim Crow South in the late nineteenth century and how she was exposed to the complexity of segregation there. Barrier left Brockport in 1875 to teach in the black school system in a South confronted with Reconstruction and marked by stark contrasts with other regions of the country. She first went to Hannibal, Missouri, and then to Washington, D.C., where she lived from 1877 to 1887 and where the largest and most cohesive group of black elites resided. This chapter first considers Barrier's time in Hannibal, where she witnessed deep racial fissures and intolerance, before turning to her migration to Washington, where she embarked on a teaching career and met her future husband S. Laing Williams. It then discusses Barrier's personal views about interracial marriage as well as the association that she had with less affluent blacks or with the racism they faced in their daily lives. It also explores how a raced identity forced Barrier to face a collective racial experience.