Featured on PDR in the collection George Washington Williams’ History of the Negro Race in America (1882–83)

George Washington Williams (1849–1891) lived the sort of picaresque life not often imagined possible for nineteenth-century African Americans. At the age of fourteen he falsified an identity and joined the Union army for the last battles of the Civil War. He continued his military career, serving in Mexico under General Espinosa and in the Indian Wars, until he was honorably discharged due to an injury. His life then moved to a series of firsts, accomplishments, blunders, setbacks, social networks, and burnt bridges. He briefly enrolled at Howard University, then left to eventually become the first Black graduate of the Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an ordained Baptist pastor, the founder of a Black newspaper in Washington D.C., a lawyer and then elected legislator in Ohio…