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Francis Williams is reputed to be the first person of African ancestry to graduate from Cambridge University.
Williams was born around 1702 to John and Dorothy Williams, a free African couple in Jamaica. John Williams had been manumitted by the will of his former master. Furthermore, a petition was filed in Jamaica on behalf of John Williams in 1708, resulting in him “being granted the rights to the known laws, customs, and privileges of an Englishman.” Williams acquired land and used enslaved Africans to work his crops of sugar cane. By 1716, John Williams had a wife and two sons, Thomas and Francis.


It is unclear how Francis Williams became the subject of a social experiment by the second Duke of Montagu. The Duke was anxious to know if a black person, trained at a grammar school and then a university, could be the literary equivalent of a white man trained in the same manner. The duke reportedly sponsored Williams being schooled at Cambridge University in England. Williams claimed to have graduated from the university, making him the first person of African ancestry to attend and graduate from Cambridge, but no record of his attendance has been found.

Williams took the oath of citizenship in England in 1723, the same year his father died. He then returned to Jamaica the following year to take over his father’s business. Yet, he ran into opposition from white elite society on the island while he reportedly looked down on the blacks who were still mostly enslaved.

Williams was described by Jamaican historian Edward Long as “haughty, opinionated, one who entertained the highest opinion of his own knowledge, treated his mother with disdain, and behaved towards his slaves with a severity beyond cruelty.” Williams’ desire to secure a position in local government was turned down by white British colonial officials, but he still wrote an ode for each incoming royal governor. Williams gained some acclaim as a poet, specializing in Latin verse. He is best remembered for “An Ode to George Haldane” and is reported to have written “Welcome, welcome Brother Debtor”.


Williams opened a school in Spanish Town, Jamaica where he taught reading, writing, Latin and mathematics, until his death in 1770 at the age of 68. At the time of his death, Williams owned sixteen slaves. A portrait of Williams hangs in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The work was acquired in 1928 and was painted by an unknown artist.

The portrait features Williams as a scholar in his study. The evidence of his education are clearly visible, including a celestial and a territorial globe. Beautifully-bound books line the shelves behind him and his left hand rests on an open book the artist claims as titled Newton’s Philosophy. The portrait reflects the style of European portraits of elite gentlemen of the era, but an open window reveals a view of Spanish Town, that situates Williams firmly in his Jamaican home town.

but no record of his attendance has been found.

It shows that brought up in a culture of privilege - irrespective of colour, religion, race, creed - man's predisposition to lord it over his fellow man - is as natural as breathing.

Jamaicans use to

It shows that brought up in a culture of privilege - irrespective of colour, religion, race, creed - man's predisposition to lord it over his fellow man - is as natural as breathing.

Thomas Nelson Baker Sr. was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy. He was a writer, orator, ethicist, and advocate for a positive black cultural identity. Baker was born a slave on August 11, 1860 to Thomas Chadwick and Edith Nottingham Baker on Robert Nottingham’s plantation in Northampton County, Virginia. Baker’s mother taught him to read the Bible and he attended public school from 1868 to 1872. He left school at the age of 12 to help support his family. Even while working as a farmhand, he continued his studies privately and in 1881 at the age of 21, he enrolled in the Hampton Institute High School program. Baker graduated in 1885 as valedictorian of his class.
Determined to prepare for college entrance, in May of 1886 Baker enrolled in the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, where despite being one of only two black students in attendance he acted as substitute principal in the summer months. He graduated from Mount Hermon in June 1889.
Baker entered Boston University’s Liberal Arts School in 1890 and graduated with his B.A. in 1893. From there he enrolled in the Yale Divinity School where he earned his Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1896. The following year he was ordained as minister at Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church in New Haven and remained there until 1901 while simultaneously studying philosophy at Yale Graduate School.
On September 18, 1901 Baker married Elizabeth Baytop (1867-3, and they had four children: Edith, Harry, Ruth, and Thomas Baker Jr. That autumn he also became minister of the Second Congregational Church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Baker successfully defended his dissertation, The Ethical Significance of the Connection Between Mind and Body, at Yale in 1903 (when he was 43) and became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in Philosophy in the U.S.
Baker wrote extensively on race issues through the remainder of his life. In 1904 he published his most significant book, Three Great Needs of the Southland, where he argued that both black people and northern whites needed to sympathize with the south due to its people spiritually and financially degrading themselves with slavery. He also argued that the South must foster a spirit of fair play if free labor is to bring prosperity and moral uplift to both black and white southerners.
In 1906 he wrote a series of essays challenging Jim Crow laws and outlining a need for black positive self-definition rather than allowing whites to define blacks. His ideas about black social, cultural, and aesthetic self-respect are seen by some scholars as a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. In July of 1907 Baker wrote a controversial article addressing miscegenation (racial intermarriage). He argued against the right of intermarriage but explained why he believed people wished to intermarry.
In 1926 Baker, at 66 the oldest clergyman in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, also became the first black pastor to deliver the traditional annual Memorial Day address at the mound of unknown dead in the city’s cemetery.
In 1938, at age 78, he mourned the loss of his wife and two years later in 1940, after resigning as Minister Emeritus of Second Congregational, he died in Pittsfield at the age of 80.

Almost everything publicly known about Williams is found in the account of him in Edward Long's three-volume History of Jamaica, published in London in 1774, twelve years after the death of Williams.2 Unfortunately, as Henri Gr?goire, an early nineteenth-century commentator, correctly notes in his own description of Williams, Long "cannot be suspected of being too partial to Negroes. His prejudice against them is manifest even in the words of praise that truth forced him to utter" (9. In Long's case, however, "prejudice" is an understatement. Long has recently been accurately described as "an apologist for the slave system and what we would now call a virulent racist" (Krise 315). In addition to being biased, Long's account of Williams is frequently misinformed, perhaps willfully so.

In addition to being biased, Long's account of Williams is frequently misinformed...

Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire (French: ]; 4 December 1750 – 28 May 1831), often referred to as the Abbé Grégoire, was a French Catholic priest, Constitutional bishop of Blois and a revolutionary leader. He was an ardent slavery abolitionist and supporter of universal suffrage. He was a founding member of the Bureau des longitudes, the Institut de France, and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers.]

Edward Long (23 August 1734 – 13 March 1813) was an English-born British colonial administrator, slave owner and historian, and author of a highly controversial work, The History of Jamaica (1774). He was a polemic defender of slavery.]