First Pan-African Conference

The First Pan-African Conference was held in London from 23 to 25 July 1900 (just prior to the Paris Exhibition of 1900 "in order to allow tourists of African descent to attend both events"). Organized primarily by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, it took place in Westminster Hall and was attended by 37 delegates and about 10 other participants and observers from Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK, including Samuel Coleridge Taylor (the youngest delegate),John Alcindor, Dadabhai Naoroji, John Archer, Henry Francis Downing, and W. E. B. Du Bois, with Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church taking the chair. Du Bois played a leading role, drafting a letter ("Address to the Nations of the World") to European leaders appealing to them to struggle against racism, to grant colonies in Africa and the West Indies the right to self-government and demanding political and other rights for African Americans.

On 24 September 1897, Henry Sylvester Williams had been instrumental in founding the African Association (not to be confused with the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa), in response to the European partition of Africa that followed the 1884-5 Congress of Berlin. The formation of the association marked an early stage in the development of the anti-colonialist movement, and was established to encourage the unity of Africans and people of African descent, particularly in territories of the British empire, concerning itself with injustices in Britain's African and Caribbean colonies. In March 1898 the association issued a circular calling for a pan-African conference. Booker T. Washington, who had been travelling in the UK in the summer of 1899, wrote in a letter to African-American newspapers:

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