Emma Hamilton Dancing

William Henry Ferris was born in New Haven in 1874. After graduating from New Haven High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1895 and a master’s degree in 1899, both from Yale. In June 1895, he gave a lecture on introductory philosophy for students in Yale’s Osborn Hall. He went on to study at the Harvard Divinity School and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Harvard in 1900.

After receiving his degrees, Ferris worked as a teacher, A. M. E. minister, lecturer, and journalist. In 1913, he published a two-volume book The African Abroad, which traces the history of Black people in Europe and the Americas. A critic of Booker T. Washington’s industrial educational philosophy, Ferris aligned himself more closely with the intellectual Alexander Crummell as well as W. E. B. Du Bois and the Niagara movement. In 1920, Ferris wrote Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture, published by the American Negro Academy, the organization Crummell founded.

Ferris became a supporter of Marcus Garvey and his brand of political and economic black nationalism. Best known for the “Back-to-Africa” movement, Garvey led the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest organization of Black people in American history. In 1919, Ferris was elected Assistant General President of the UNIA and served as literary editor of its newspaper, The Negro World, with a circulation of 200,000 copies. In 1922, he was part of a UNIA delegation that petitioned the League of Nations to give African land colonized by Germany to Black people to establish a homeland. In the 1930s, he served as Dean of the Glasgow Normal and Theological Institute in Glasgow, Kentucky. He died in 1941.