Kenneth Gibson

Kenneth Allen Gibson was born on the fifteenth of May 1932 in Enterprise, Alabama, the elder of two sons. Around 1940, when he was about eight, his family joined the Great Migration northward, settling in the Central Ward of Newark, New Jersey. His father, Willie, found work at the Swift meatpacking plant in nearby Kearny, and his mother, Daisy, worked as a seamstress. His younger brother, Harold, would later serve at his side in city government.

Gibson graduated from Central High School and pursued civil engineering at the Newark College of Engineering, earning his degree in 1962 while working and completing military service — including a posting in Hawaii with the U.S. Army's 65th Engineer Battalion. He rose through the city's technical ranks, serving as chief engineer of the Newark Housing Authority and later as the city's chief structural engineer.

In 1970, emerging from a crowded field, Gibson won a runoff against the incumbent to become the first African American mayor of Newark — and the first Black mayor of a major Northeastern city. He was re-elected to four consecutive terms, governing from 1970 to 1986, and in 1976 became the first African American president of the United States Conference of Mayors. He counted the improvement of Newark's public health — sharp reductions in tuberculosis, infant mortality, and maternal deaths — among his proudest achievements.

Kenneth Gibson died on the twenty-ninth of March 2019, in West Orange, New Jersey, at the age of eighty-six. He broke a ceiling that could not be un-broken, and every mayor who followed him walks through a door he opened. May his name be honored.