[1] Heather Andrea Williams moved to the United States from Jamaica when she was 11 years old.
[2] She attended Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York,[2] then Harvard College, graduating in 1978, then earned a J.D.
She practiced law in the public sector, serving as an assistant attorney general and section chief for the State of New York and as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
[3] After teaching history at Saint Ann's School for two years,[2] she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University[4] in 2002.
[3] Her book Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (2012), about ads placed after emancipation to reunify families, was described as "a superbly researched and engaging analysis" by John G. Cox, though Williams's writing was criticized for engaging "only very slightly with extant scholarship".