Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (17 April 1823 – 11 July 1915) was an African-American attorney, judge, diplomat and banker. Born in Philadelphia, he moved to California as a young man during the California Gold Rush. Angered by discriminatory laws passed in 1858, he and several hundred American blacks moved that year to Victoria, British Columbia. Gibbs lived and worked there for ten years.

After the American Civil War, Gibbs and many of the other black settlers returned to the United States. In the late 1860s, he settled in Little Rock, Arkansas, the capital of the state, and became an attorney. He was active in Reconstruction politics, and in 1873 Gibbs was elected as a city judge, the first black judge elected in the US. In 1897 he was appointed as American consul to Madagascar.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was born in 1823 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (a free state), as the second of four siblings, the eldest being brother Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs. Their father was a Methodist minister. As a young adult, Gibbs became active in the abolitionist movement in the city and worked for Frederick Douglass. He was also involved in the Philomatheon Institute of Philadelphia, a literary organization which included Douglass, Charles Burleigh Purvis, William Whipper, and Izaiah Weir. Philadelphia had long had a flourishing free black community, as people had found work there even before the revolution and slavery was abolished after the Revolutionary War. Like tens of thousands of other men, Gibbs moved to California during the Gold Rush years. He arrived in San Francisco in late 1850 and tried to find work as a carpenter, a trade he had pursued in Philadelphia, but was discouraged by discrimination he faced. He then partnered with Nathan Pointer selling clothers, and then with Peter Lester importing boots and shoes. In 1851 together with Jonas H. Townsend, W. H. Newby, and William H. Hall, he published the Alta California, "the state's only African-American newspaper." He was later a proprietor, publisher, and contributor to another paper, The Mirror of the Times. He was also active in statewide conventions of black people in 1854, 1855, and 1857, and together with Lester, stood against poll taxes in San Francisco.

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