George Williams College (Chicago) George Williams College (Chicago) George Williams College was a college located in the northwestern corner of Hyde Park, Chicago. The college was an expansion of a summer camp founded by the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) on the shores of Geneva Lake, Wisconsin in 1886. The college remained in Hyde Park from its founding in 1890 until 1965, when it moved to Downers Grove, Illinois. Subsequently, the Hyde Park campus was demolished in 1989. George Williams College can trace its origin to a summer camp founded on the shores of Geneva Lake, Wisconsin by YMCA leaders I. E. Brown, William
George Washington Williams George Washington Williams George Washington Williams (October 16, 1849 – August 2, 1891) was an American Civil War soldier, Baptist minister, politician, lawyer, journalist, and writer on African-American history. In the late 1880s, Williams turned his interest to Europe and Africa. After having been impressed by meeting King Léopold II of Belgium, he traveled in 1890 to the Congo Free State (then owned by the king) to see its development. Shocked by the widespread, brutal abuses and near-slavery imposed on the Congolese, he wrote an open letter to Leopold in 1890 about the suffering of the region's native inhabitants at