Ebenezer Bassett

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett was born on the sixteenth of October 1833 in Litchfield County, Connecticut, into a free family whose dignity long predated the freedom of most Black Americans. His grandfather Tobiah had won his liberty through service in the American Revolution and was esteemed enough that Derby's Black community elected him a "Black Governor" in 1815. That honor passed to Ebenezer's father, Eben Tobias Bassett, who served in the same office around 1840 to 1845. His mother, Susan Gregory Bassett, carried Pequot ancestry, so that Ebenezer inherited both African and Native American lineages of endurance.

He rose through learning at a time when learning was denied to most who looked like him. In 1853 he became the first Black student at the Connecticut Normal School, and by 1857 he was principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, one of the foremost centers of Black education in the nation. There, for twelve years, he shaped a generation of scholars and moved among the leading abolitionists of his age.

In 1869 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him United States Minister Resident to Haiti — the first African American ever to lead an American diplomatic mission anywhere in the world. Fluent in French and steady in judgment, he departed by steamship in June of that year to serve through eight years of Haitian civil war, coups, and the perilous sheltering of political refugees, holding his post until 1877.

He served afterward as Haiti's consul in New York and died in Brooklyn on the thirteenth of November 1908. Ebenezer Bassett opened a door no one before him had been permitted to approach, and he carried the honor of his people through it with grace. May his steadfast name be remembered.