Frances E. Williams

Frances Elizabeth Williams (September 17, 1905 – January 2, 1995) was an actress, activist, organizer, and community worker. Williams was the first black woman to run for the California State Assembly in 1948 on the Progressive Ticket and served on the boards of the Screen Actors Guild, Actors' Lab, and Actors Equity. She represented the World Peace Council at the first Angola Independence Celebration in 1975, and co-founded the Art Against Apartheid Movement in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

Born Frances Elizabeth Jones on September 17, 1908, in East Orange, New Jersey, to William Henry Jones and Elizabeth Nelson Jones, the youngest of three children. Her father drove a delivery wagon, and her mother was a laundress. Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, William Jones died. Her mother, Elizabeth, met and married Ben Williams, a policeman; the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. While still in high school, Williams got a job as director of activities at the Central Avenue Bath House. Down the street from the Bath House was the Playhouse Settlement founded by Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, who graduated with their masters in social work from Oberlin College. Williams began working at the Playhouse Settlement. She became the Settlement’s first resident worker and lived there fourteen years until she left to study theater in the Soviet Union.

Part of the Settlement House was for recreational activity for the young including a children’s theater started by Rowena Jelliffe and later an adult theater. Williams began writing and directing some of the plays performed in the children’s theater and later in the adult theater she performed with Hazel Mountain Walker, John Marriott and others. In 1922, after a visit from Charles Gilpin, the Dumas Dramatic Club changed its name to the Gilpin Players in his honor. In 1927 the name of the theater was changed to Karamu House, a Swahili word for central meeting place.

In 1932, Williams married George Ferguson, a man she’d known a number of years. The marriage lasted one year.

She remained for fourteen years at Karamu House, taking part in eighty-five productions, writing and directing plays, making costumes, and designing sets, On the suggestion of her friend Langston Hughes, and the encouragement from playwright Friedrich Wolf who wrote "Sailors of Cattaro," she went to the Soviet Union to study theater. In 1934, Soviet theater was known for its outstanding productions by actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold, directors Constantin Stanislavski, Elanskaya, Natalie Satz, Moskvin, and Kachaov. Williams studied at the Children’s Theatretun by Meyerholdd and Natalie Satz and attended many of the theater productions in Moscow.

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