Because of Barrier Williams’ experience with racism in Hannibal, she chose to join her family friend Frederick Douglass in Washington DC. Douglass had been a dear friend to Barrier Williams’ father since 1856 when he lectured in Brockport and would go on to have a lifelong friendship with the Barrier family. Moving to DC “reunited Fannie with her sister Ella, intimately connected her to the largest contingent of blacks that she had ever known, and helped her understand how a raced person could exist within the confines of…southern black culture” (Hendricks 30). This group provided Barrier Williams a space to learn more about the oppression of her people, and how to exist in a world that was much harsher than her integrated home in Brockport. Hendricks writes, “For the first time Barrier was immersed in a racially separate and cohesive community. The solidity created a race and class consciousness unlike anything that she had ever encountered in her overwhelmingly
white northern home town” (32). Through her time in DC, Barrier Williams gained racial and limited class consciousness, which contributed to her work as an activist.
Portrait of Frederick Douglass, 1879