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Mifflin Gibbs, Businessman, and Abolitionist born

Mifflin W. Gibbs

Mifflin Gibbs was born on this date in 1823. He was a Black entrepreneur, lawyer, and abolitionist.

From Philadelphia, PA., Mifflin Wister Gibbs was born free and attended grade school until his father died in 1831. He drove a doctor's carriage to help his mother and three siblings before becoming a carpenter’s apprentice at sixteen. Throughout his life, he was a member of the Philomathean Institute, a Colored men’s literacy society, and he was active in the Underground Railroad.

In 1849, Gibbs was involved enough in the abolition movement to accompany Frederick Douglass on a speaking tour in western New York. A year later, he relocated to San Francisco, where racial prejudice forced him to abandon carpentry. With money saved as a shoe shiner, Gibbs opened a successfully imported clothing store and soon rose to prominence. In 1854, he became a delegate to that state’s Negro Convention, and over the next three years, he served as editor of the Mirror of the Times, an abolitionist newspaper.

Seeking to make money from the discovery of gold, he left for British Columbia in 1858. He returned briefly to marry Maria A. Alexander. While in Canada, he acquired a small fortune in real estate and other trades and became director of the Queen Charlotte Island Coal Company. In 1866 and 1867, he was twice elected to the Victoria Common Council. In 1869, he returned to America to study law at Oberlin College and opened his practice in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Gibbs was appointed county attorney in 1873 and elected municipal court judge of Little Rock later the same year, becoming the first African American Judge in America.  Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him the registrar of the United States lands in 1877, a position he held for two years.  An active Republican, Gibbs returned to Little Rock, remaining active in the business and the civil rights movement.  He published his autobiography Shadow and Light in 1902, which contains an introduction written by his friend and colleague Booker T. Washington.

During his diverse career, he advocated the creation of a strong, skilled African American middle class through the acquisition of property and independent control of agriculture and industry.  Mifflin Gibbs died on July 11, 1915.

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