Mifflin W. Gibbs

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was born on the seventeenth of April 1823 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister who died in 1831, leaving his widow with four young children in modest circumstances. Among his siblings was his eldest brother, Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs, who would later serve as Secretary of State in Reconstruction Florida. Coming of age in a household that prized faith and learning, Mifflin apprenticed as a carpenter and was drawn early into the abolitionist cause, working for a time alongside Frederick Douglass.

Drawn west by the Gold Rush, Gibbs settled in San Francisco around 1850 and rose as a merchant and a leader of California's growing Black community, co-founding the state's first Black newspaper, Mirror of the Times, in 1855. Chafing against California's discriminatory laws, in 1858 he led a migration of African Americans to Victoria, British Columbia, where he prospered in business and, in 1866, became the first Black person elected to public office in British Columbia when he won a seat on the Victoria City Council.

Returning to the United States, Gibbs read law in Little Rock, Arkansas, passed the bar, and in 1873 was elected city judge as a Republican — the first African American elected to a municipal judgeship in the United States. He went on to become register of the U.S. Land Office at Little Rock and, in 1897, was appointed by President William McKinley as United States Consul to Tamatave, Madagascar, a post he held until 1901. In 1902 he published his autobiography, Shadow and Light, prefaced by Booker T. Washington.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs died in Little Rock on the eleventh of July 1915, at the age of ninety-two. From a carpenter's bench to the bench of a courtroom, and from the goldfields to the councils of nations, he opened doors that had never before been opened — and we honor the steadfast dignity with which he walked through them.