William H. Gibson | |
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Gibson in 1897
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Born | 1829 Baltimore, Maryland |
Died | June 2, 1906 Louisville, Kentucky, United States |
(aged 76–77)
Occupation | Educator, civil servant |
Political party | Republican |
William H. Gibson (1829 – June 2, 1906) was an educator and community organizer in Louisville, Kentucky. He was one of the first African American teachers in that city, active before the Emancipation Proclamation. He was a civil servant after the American Civil War, and was subject to attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1876 he founded the United Brothers of Friendship, a fraternal organization for African Americans.
William H. Gibson was born in 1829 in Baltimore, Maryland to free blacks, Philip and Amelia Gibson. He learned to read by the age of five and intended a school taught by John Fortie. His parents wished that he could learn the printer's trade, but he could not due to his race, but he worked as a porter at the book store of the Lutheran Book Company and he continued his studies during that time. He took instruction in English and Latin from Daniel Payne. He also became passionate about music, taking classes from violinist James Anderson. He became a member of the Sharpe Street choir and musical associations. In 1847 he moved to Louisville, Kentucky with Robert Lane and James Harper and opened a day school, a night school, and a singing school in the basement of the Methodist church on Fourth and Green Streets. Many of the students were slaves. Gibson played the violin, piano, and guitar, and taught them to others. In 1852, Gibson traveled to the Free Soil Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania led by Frederick Douglass, William Harlan Garnett, Martin R. Delany, Henry Wilson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Thaddeus Stevens. He opened another school in the early 1850s on Seventh Street between Green and Jefferson, and in 1859 he opened a school at Quinn Chapel AME Church. This school temporarily closed in September 1862 together with other churches and schools due to the American Civil War.
In the fall of 1862, Gibson and many other African Americans in Louisville joined the city's "spade and shovel brigade", making entrenchments to protect Louisville from an anticipated attack by General Braxton Bragg's Army in Kentucky. After a short time, Gibson moved to Indianapolis where he took charge of a Quaker supported school for former slaves there. In Indianapolis, Gibson worked with Dr. W. R. Revels and Sidney S. Hinton and others. In May 1863, he received a commission from Colonel Condee to recruit for the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. He first went to Louisville, but military authorities decided Kentucky recruits should not become soldiers in Massachusetts and Gibson was arrested and ordered to leave Kentucky. He then traveled through Indiana, recruiting particularly in Charlestown, New Albany, and Jeffersonville. In the spring of 1865, he went to Leavenworth, Kansas at the call of John Turner where he taught a school supported by the American Missionary Society until the end of the war.