ABSTRACT
George Washington Williams was born on October 16, 1849 in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania. Although free blacks, his father Thomas Williams and mother Ellen Rouse struggled to garner enough resources to provide a good education for their children. George Williams, therefore, joined the Union Army in 1864 at the age of fourteen. After the civil war, Williams reenlisted in the United States Army until September 1868. Williams’s first public articulation of his desire to see the spread of Christianity to Africa and the end of Africans’ enslavement came out in the valedictory speech he gave to his classmates, faculty, and invited guests at the 1874 commencement. The sense of activism for racial and social justice that Williams developed while in Newton no doubt guided his action in his versatile professional career as a Baptist clergyman, a journalist, a historian, and a politician in the United States and as an explorer in Africa.
