At the time he was performing, Bert Williams was regarded as “the first black performer who could be described as in international pop star”  and was “the most respected comedian on the American stage” (2, 4).  While much of Williams’ life is known because of this fame, the truth of his early life remains hidden due to the multiple stories he told reporters. The consensus of historians is that Williams was born in the West Indies to mixed-race parentage and moved to California as a young child. In an interview, Williams once said, “Nobody in America knows my real name and, if I can prevent it, nobody ever will. That was the only promise I made to my father” (1).  Williams’ life began to be cataloged once he met the second half of his comedic duo, the much more outspoken George Walker. Williams met Walker in San Francisco around 1893 and won a coin toss to appear as the first name in their billings for Williams and Walker (1).

Williams and Walker decided that in order to be successful amongst the numerous white comedians performing in blackface, they would “bill themselves as ‘The Two Real Coons’,” a name which caught the attention of theater managers and helped them break onto the Vaudeville scene (1).  As a duo, Williams and Walker were the first black recording artists (1901), the first black performers to star in a full-length Broadway musical (1902), and they received an invitation to bring their company to England to perform for the king and queen of England (3). Despite their success, Williams and Walker could never escape racial prejudice and chose to ameliorate their theater experiences by never booking a performance south of the Mason-Dixon line. Together, the duo helped found the black actors’ organization The Frogs, which raised money for charity, promoted the arts, and staged a major showcase every year. In 1910, Williams was elected its president (1).  After Walker had to retire from the stage for health reasons, Williams developed his own theory of comedy to challenge the common ideas of blackface, and he was finally able to escape Walker’s desire to include “African” elements in every show, thus allowing Williams to put his character into less racial contexts. In Williams’ essay, “The Comic Side of Trouble” from the 1918 issue of American Magazine, he challenged the idea of a stock-type black character, arguing that “[black people] have as many differences as the white man and no one characteristic covers us all” (3). Despite this claim, he still performed in blackface in order to keep a distance between his character and himself in the audience’s mind.

Unfortunately, Williams stage career was cut short as he suffered from poor circulation, depression, and alcoholism. Williams was offered a role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, one of America’s most important plays starring a black tragedian, but had to turn down the offer because of health and social complications (1).  Despite his ailments, Williams performed up to three shows a day until he collapsed during a performance in his own revue, Broadway Brevities (1). He died on March 4, 1922, and people “in every walk of life, irrespective of race, creed or color, paid homage” to him, with the Masonic Temple in New York making an exception to give him a proper funeral (1).  Bert Williams’ contributions to theater and the movement for equality left considerable marks, as his efforts in the theater paved the way for the artists of the Harlem Renaissance to produce shows like Shuffle Along (1). His friends have nothing but praise for the man. Fellow comedian W. C. Fields remarked, “He was the funniest man I ever saw…and the saddest man I ever met” (4). But George Washington Carver best summed up Williams’ contributions by saying, “Bert Williams has done more for the race than I have. He’s smiled his way into people’s hearts” (4).