Peter Williams Jr. (1786–1840) was an African-American Episcopal priest, the second ordained in the United States and the first to serve in New York City.

In the 1820s and 1830s, he strongly opposed the American Colonization Society's efforts to relocate free blacks to the colony of Liberia in West Africa.

It developed as an independent black denomination, the second in the United States after the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), which was founded in Philadelphia.

[1] After the American Civil War, the AME Zion Church sent missionaries to the South and planted many congregations there among freedmen.

Thomas Lyell, Williams organized a black Episcopal congregation, which identified as St. Philip's African Church.

Williams believed that abolitionist societies would rescue freed African-Americans from the ‘evil consequences’ of slavery through 'example, the lessons of morality, industry and economy', that would one day create a world where ‘all the distinctions between the inalienable rights of black men, and white’ were gone.

That same year he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and was selected as one of the African-American leaders on the executive board of the interracial group.