Mifflin W. Gibbs

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was born on the seventeenth of April 1823 at Philadelphia, the son of Jonathan C. Gibbs — a Black Methodist Episcopal preacher of the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church at Philadelphia — and Maria Jackson Gibbs. He was raised in the Black professional Philadelphia of the antebellum period.

He was placed at six at the Mother Bethel Church Sunday School and at the Quaker-run Institute for Coloured Youth at Philadelphia for the closing portion of the secondary education.

He was apprenticed at fifteen to the white carpenter James Gibbons at Philadelphia in the carpentry-and-cabinet trade for five years through 1843. He worked as a journeyman carpenter at Philadelphia from 1843 to 1849 and joined the United States merchant marine for two voyages to England in 1849 and 1850.

He relocated to San Francisco in 1850 in the second wave of the Gold Rush — among the principal Black-Philadelphia migrants to California of the period — and operated at San Francisco the Wellington Boot Emporium from 1851 to 1858. The Wellington Emporium was the principal Black-San-Francisco retail establishment of the antebellum period.

He co-founded in 1855 with Peter Anderson the Mirror of the Times — the first Black-owned newspaper in the state of California.

He relocated to Victoria, British Columbia in 1858 in flight from the California Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and operated at Victoria the principal Black-Canadian retail-and-real-estate operation of the period. He was elected in 1866 to the Victoria City Council — the first African American elected to a Canadian municipal government.

He returned to the United States in 1869 at the close of the Victoria period and settled at Little Rock, Arkansas. He took the LL.B. at the Oberlin Business College Law Department in 1870 — having read law under the white Little Rock attorney William H. Stillwell across the closing year of 1869.

He was elected on the third of November 1873 to the Little Rock Municipal Police Court as municipal judge — the first African American elected to a municipal judgeship in the United States. He served the Little Rock Municipal Court from 1873 to 1875.

He served as the Register of the United States Land Office at Little Rock under the appointment of President Ulysses S. Grant from 1876 to 1880 — among the principal post-Reconstruction Black federal appointees of the period — and as the Receiver of Public Moneys of the Little Rock Land Office under President Chester A. Arthur from 1882 to 1888.

He was nominated by President William McKinley on the twenty-seventh of April 1897 as United States Consul to Tamatave, on the eastern coast of Madagascar — the first African American consul at any African post. He served the Tamatave Consulate from 1897 to 1901, where he conducted the principal commercial-treaty negotiations between the United States and the French colonial administration of Madagascar of the period.

He died at Little Rock on the eleventh of July 1915 of natural causes, at ninety-two.

He is honored here as the first Black municipal judge in the United States.