Founder Rhode Island Roger Williams was born in London, England, in 1603 – the year Queen Elizabeth I died and Shakespeare published "Hamlet". Benjamin Franklin, the oldest of America’s Founding Fathers, would not be born for another century. Until then, Roger Williams stood unchallenged as the country’s prototype rebel.

It was an unexpected fate for a man born to privilege, who read law at Cambridge and was expected by his family to take his place in Parliament as a card-carrying member of the ruling class.

Instead, the young Williams embarked to America, where he landed in Massachusetts Bay Colony and immediately began alienating Puritan leaders with his unorthodox ideas – for example, calling for the complete separation of church and state, and denying the legitimacy of England’s claims to America, arguing instead that it belonged solely to the Native Americans. In his first book, "A Key to the Language of America", Williams argued that clear communication between colonists and Indians was essential to peaceful association.

The Puritans quickly grew weary of Williams and his views. In 1635, he was arrested, convicted of spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions,” and sentenced to deportation back to England. Williams, however, fled south into the wilderness, taking refuge with some Native American friends in present-day Rhode Island, who eventually granted him settlement rights covering most of what is now Providence, East Providence, Cranston, and Pawtucket, R.I.

The new colony enjoyed peaceful coexistence with the local Indian tribes, and Williams eventually solidified his claim under British law, in 1663 gaining an official charter that formally created Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

A classic Williams biography, "The Gentle Radical", calls Williams’ “lively experiment” the “symbol of a critical turning point in American thought and institutions,” noting that Williams “was the first American to advocate and activate complete freedom of conscience, dissociation of church and state, and genuine political democracy.”

Williams’ independent-minded spirit lived on into the Revolutionary period, when Rhode Island became both the first colony to declare independence from Great Britain and the last to join the new union.

In fact, the America we know today is much more a product of Williams’ vision than that of the Puritans. The law banishing Williams from Massachusetts was not removed from the books until 1936, when that state’s legislature finally passed a bill ending his 300-year exile. As Ian Goddard, Williams’ great grandson (eight generations removed), wryly comments, “It would seem they were determined to make sure that troublemaker wasn’t coming back.”

The Roger Williams Statue

World-renowned Rhode Island sculptor Armand LaMontagne created the life-sized replica of Roger Williams which has become a source of pride for everyone associated with the University.

Holding a book titled Soul Liberty 1636 in his left hand, Roger Williams' likeness reaches out atop a knoll overlooking the central Bristol campus with his right hand, as if to greet us with a friendly handshake.

His bronze likeness gazes out across the campus toward the Mt. Hope Bay, a land he no doubt visited often.