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When set forth to study local Black history as a graduate student in the 1970s, her professors told her there were no sources to support her research.

Williams, now an associate professor in the University at Buffalo’s Department of Africana and American Studies, understood that what her professors said could not be true. “We knew there were sources, that there were primary records,” she says. “The question was: Have they been collected by the repositories in the area? They had not. And what we did was to collect them.”

Williams’ search for historical records pertaining to the lives of local African American people and organizations yielded a wealth of material.

“We discovered there were major collections, in people’s garages, in their attics, and they saved them. So it was almost as if they were waiting for us to come along and ask for those records,” Williams says. She and her fellow historians worked closely with members of the community at every stage of the effort. At first, “it wasn’t easy,” she recalls, “because people wanted to make sure they could trust us, that we would preserve their records, because that was a part of their legacy.”

Over time, the team microfilmed a colossal number of documents: photographs, letters, scrapbooks, leaflets, event programs, newsletters and more, including a trove of papers from the Michigan Avenue YMCA and the J. Edward Nash collections. Many of these records might not otherwise have survived.

Those efforts helped to catalyze the 1974 formation and subsequent growth of the Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier, which has since built a collection of over 600,000 pages of documents from local African American organizations, families and individuals. This project has had a tremendous impact upon the academy. Scholars from across the United States and abroad have come to Buffalo to study and to disseminate their work in local history.

Williams’ work on the project illustrates a central theme of her career: building up resources that enable fellow historians to carry out research in the areas of Black history, women’s history and local history. Sources that were assumed to be lost or nonexistent have over time taken on the significance they deserve.

Particularly gratifying, says Williams, has been observing the “path-breaking” change in the field of Black women’s history. “There’s been a shift in the scholarship in the field,” she says. “It’s just grown tremendously over the decades, and now scholars are attacking all issues. Nothing’s off the table.”