Tunis Campbell

Tunis Gulic Campbell was born on the first of April 1812 in the village of Middlebrook, in Somerset County, New Jersey, one of ten children of free Black parents. His father, John Campbell, worked as a Middlebrook blacksmith. From about age five to eighteen Tunis attended an Episcopal school in Babylon, New York, gaining an education rare for an African American of his day. In 1832 he broke with the colonization movement, founding an anticolonization society and vowing never to leave the country until every enslaved person was free on American soil.

While preaching against slavery and establishing schools, Campbell earned his living in the hospitality trade, serving as a hotel steward and head waiter in New York City and Boston, including a period as principal waiter at New York's Howard Hotel. In 1848 he published the Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters, and Housekeepers' Guide, celebrated as the first American manual of its kind, setting out a disciplined method for managing a first-class hotel while insisting that workers be educated, well paid, and treated with dignity.

After serving as a Union chaplain in the Civil War, Campbell came to Georgia and became the most influential African American politician in the nineteenth-century state. Working under the Freedmen's Bureau, he supervised land and settlement for freedpeople on the coastal islands, then rose to justice of the peace, delegate to the constitutional convention, and state senator, championing equal education, integrated juries, homestead protection, and fair voting.

For his leadership he was targeted, and in 1876 was convicted on a dubious charge and leased to a convict labor camp. He died on the fourth of December 1891 in Boston. May the steward who fed guests with dignity and fought for the freedom of his people be honored without end.