Dorothy Williams

Dorothy Adams Williams (January 1928 – April 2011) was a South African educator who fought against apartheid. Adams was subject to a banning order and eventually left South Africa in exile; she worked with Albie Sachs in London. After her return to South Africa with her husband, Frank Williams, they were the first mixed-race couple on their street in Wellington, Western Cape.

Biography Adams was born in Wellington 15 January 1928. Her great-grandfather, the West Indian photographer Francis McDonald Gow, had introduced the African-American-founded African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC) to South Africa. Her maternal grandfather was an AMEC minister, and her parents, Frederick and Rachel (nee Gow), were both involved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC). In September 1963, she was arrested while teaching at Pauw Gedenk primary school. Her students watched as she was taken by police and put into a police van. In jail, she was the prisoner Albie Sachs describes in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966) whistling the "Going Home" theme from the New World Symphony by Antonín Dvořák. Adams started working at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and also with Sachs on post-apartheid issues. Sachs and Adams worked together for 3 years on research towards a new constitution for South Africa.

In 1991, Adams and her husband moved back to South Africa where she worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the University of Western Cape. She and her husband moved back to Wellington in 1999 and were the "first mixed-race couple to live on the street that once marked the divide between white and non-white Wellingtonians." Her husband died in 2006 and Adams died in a nursing home in April 2011.