Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he moved to California as a young man during the Gold Rush. Angered by discriminatory laws passed in 1858, he and several hundred other American blacks moved that year to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where he worked for ten years.

After the American Civil War, Gibbs and many of the other black settlers returned to the United States. In the late 1860s, he settled in the capital city of Little Rock, Arkansas, and became an attorney. He was active in Reconstruction politics, and in 1873 Gibbs was elected as a city judge, the first black judge elected in the United States. In 1897, in the William McKinley administration, he was appointed as American consul to Madagascar.

Gibbs was the second of four siblings, the eldest being his brother Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs. Their father was a Methodist minister.[5] As a young adult, Gibbs became active in the abolitionist movement and worked for Frederick Douglass.[6] He was also involved in the Philomatheon Institute of Philadelphia, a literary organization which included Douglass, Charles Burleigh Purvis, William Whipper, and Izaiah Weir.[7] Philadelphia had long had a flourishing free black community, as people had found work there even before the revolution and slavery was abolished after the American Revolutionary War.

Like tens of thousands of other men, Gibbs joined the California Gold Rush,[6] having arrived in San Francisco in late 1850. He sought work as a carpenter, a trade that he had pursued in Philadelphia, but was discouraged by the racial discrimination that he faced. He then partnered with Nathan Pointer to sell clothes and then with Peter Lester to import boots and shoes. In 1851, he and Jonas H. Townsend, W. H. Newby, and William H. Hall, published the Alta California,[7] "the state's only African-American newspaper."[6] He was later a proprietor, publisher, and contributor to another paper, The Mirror of the Times.[8] He was active in statewide conventions of black people in 1854, 1855, and 1857, and together with Lester, stood against poll taxes in San Francisco.[7]

In 1858, he and other American blacks were angered when the California State Legislature passed discriminatory laws intended to discourage blacks from entering or staying in the state: they were deprived of the right to own property and were disqualified from giving evidence against a white person in court. All black people in California were required to wear distinctive badges.[9] Angered by these developments, Gibbs and two other African-American men went to British Columbia to meet with Sir James Douglas, governor of the province, to learn about the treatment of blacks in Canada. Douglas assured the men that they would be treated like other residents in this frontier area.

Starting in 1858, Gibbs led an estimated six hundred to eight hundred African Americans,[10] many with families, from California to British Columbia, where some settled on Vancouver Island.[9] They comprised a major portion of the early frontier community.[10] Gibbs became a naturalized British citizen in 1861, together with fifty-two other American blacks from the emigrant group.[10] Gibbs worked as a merchant and also became involved in politics during his ten-year stay in Canada.

In the 1860 Vancouver Island Legislative election, the vote of the black community in the election for the Vancouver Island Legislative Assembly defeated Amor De Cosmos.[11]

After about a decade, Gibbs returned to the United States and settled in Little Rock. He read the law to become an attorney and passed the bar examination in 1870. Becoming active in the Republican Party, he was appointed to a number of judicial and government positions, including county attorney of Pulaski County.[15] In 1872, he was a delegate to the National Convention of Colored men in New Orleans, Louisiana.[7] In 1873, Gibbs was elected city judge as a Republican,[15] the first black judge elected in the United States.[5]

In 1876, he was elected president of the National Convention of Colored Men at Nashville, Tennessee, and in June of that year he was appointed register of the United States Land Office at Little Rock. He was a delegate to the 1876, 1880 Republican National Convention, and 1884 Republican National Conventions, and was a number of the "immortal 306" who supported Ulysses S. Grant's failed candidacy for a third nomination at the 1880 convention in Chicago, Illinois. In 1882, Gibbs was elected to the Little Rock Bar Association.[7]

He became wealthy through his law practice and real estate investments. In 1897, Gibbs was appointed American consul to Madagascar. As an aide, he hired a friend of his daughter Ida, William Henry Hunt, whom he mentored. Hunt became the first African American to have a full career as a diplomat for the United States.

Gibbs returned to the United States in 1901. He was selected as president of a largely African-American bank in Little Rock. M. W. Gibbs High School, a high school for African-American students, and Gibbs Elementary School, also originally for African-American students in segregated Arkansas, were named after him.[16]

Gibbs was married and had two daughters with his wife, the former Maria Ann Alexander, during the decade they lived in British Columbia. The family relocated to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1869 where both daughters later attended college. Mary Ann had attended Oberlin College from 1852 to 1854. Daughter Ida Alexander Gibbs (1862–1957) earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in English. Her sister, Harriet Gibbs Marshall went to the Oberlin Music Conservatory, where she completed the equivalent of a bachelor's degree in music in 1889. She became an accomplished concert pianist, author, and educator.[17][18]

Ida met and became friends with William Henry Hunt, whom Mifflin Gibbs hired as his aide in Tamatave, Madagascar. Hunt was appointed to succeed Gibbs as American consul in Madagascar and had numerous assignments after that. He served until 1932.[6]

In 1902, Gibbs purchased a property at 902 T Street, NW in Washington, D.C., at which his daughter, Harriet Gibbs Marshall, ran the Washington Conservatory of Music there, one of the most successful female-owned businesses in the United States at the turn of the century.

He died on July 11, 1915 in his house at 1518 Chester Street in Little Rock after an illness of several months. He is buried at Oakland-Fraternal Cemetery.[19]

• Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar. Shadow and Light: An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
• McGinty, Doris E. "The Washington Conservatory of Music and School of Expression," Black perspectives in music, vol 7, no. 1, spring 1979.

Media related to Mifflin Wistar Gibbs at Wikimedia Commons

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Works by Mifflin Wistar Gibbs at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Mifflin Wistar Gibbs at Internet Archive