JONATHAN C. GIBBS

Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs was born on September 28, 1821, in Philadelphia and was the eldest child of Maria Jackson (Gibbs) and Rev. Jonathan Gibbs. Although the children had to leave school to work after their father’s death, their early exposure to education amidst racial violence toward free Blacks no doubt fueled their educational activism and political careers. Jonathan Gibbs went on to attend Kimball Union Academy, graduating in 1848, and then became the third African American to graduate from Dartmouth in 1852. He also studied at Princeton Theological Seminary. He later became Florida’s first Black Secretary of State and the first Superintendent of Public Instruction, the early equivalent of the Superintendent of Schools. 

Jonathan Gibbs married Anna Amelia Harris, and the couple had three children, including Thomas Van Rensselaer Gibbs, who carried on the family’s civic activism and service who was named after his father’s friend and fellow activist, Thomas Van Rensselaer. Their daughter Julia was named after James. W.C. Pennighton. After Gibbs and Anna Amelia Harris divorced, he remarried Elizabeth May Gibbs. His children and grandchildren credit her with rearing them and “gave them an opportunity for education and useful service.” [1]

After the Civil War, Gibbs joined the many educated free African Americans who traveled south to run and organize schools for Black southerners. When he settled in Florida In 1867, the Republican governor of Florida appointed him as Secretary of State. Targeted by white terrorists, Gibbs slept in his attic where he could defend himself more effectively, according to his brother, Mifflin W. Gibbs, “as his life had been threatened by the ‘Ku Klu.'” [2] This did not stop Gibbs from actively investigating and trying to prosecute the Klan and other terrorists. 

Gibbs’s tenure as Secretary of State ended in 1872, after which he became the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. As his obituary noted after his death in 1874, “It was a post of considerable difficulty, from the scantiness of the provision made for the support of public schools, from the disordered condition of some important school funds…But Mr. Gibbs entered earnestly upon his work, and, with the aid of good school-laws secured by his predecessors, soon made a marked impression.” [3] Gibbs built on efforts to secure education for African Americans included in Florida’s 1868 Constitution, which he had helped write as a delegate to the Florida Constitutional Convention. That convention was also filled with racist whites loyal to President Andrew Johnson, who was impeached before Floridians could finish drafting their new constitution. [4] Jonathan Gibbs’s son, Thomas V.R. Gibbs was also a delegate at the 1886 Florida Constitutional Convention. Like his father, he too fought to make sure the state  funded Black education from primary schools through higher ed. Indeed, the Thomas V.R. Gibbs, a co-founder of Florida A&M University. Indeed, generations of students stayed in Gibbs Hall which was named in Gibbs’s honor.  

Explore the storymap below to learn more about Jonathan C. Gibbs’s participation in colored conventions.

REFERENCES

[1] Woodson, C. G. “THE GIBBS FAMILY.” Negro History Bulletin 11, no. 1, 1947, p. 12.

[2] Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar. Shadow and Light: An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century, Washington, DC, 1902, p. 112.

[3] Richardson, Joe M. “Jonathan C. Gibbs: Florida’s Only Negro Cabinet Member.” The Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4, Florida Historical Society, 1964, p. 364.

[4] Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar. Shadow and Light: An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century, Washington, DC, 1902, p. 112.

CREDITS

Written by: Rachel Nelson for ENGL/HIST 677, taught by P. Gabrielle Foreman, University of Delaware, Spring 2019.

Edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman.

Acknowledgements: Samantha de Vera and Michelle Byrnes for further edits, visualization contributions, and technical assistance.