"Mifflin Wistar Gibbs" {April 17,1823-July 11,1915}

Businessman,politician,and race leader,was born in Philadelphia,Pennsylvania,the son of

Jonathan C.Gibbs,a Methodist minister,and Maria Jackson.His parents were free blacks.His father died when Mifflin was seven,and his mother was an invalid.As a teenager Mifflin attended the Philomathean Institute,a black men's literary society, and like his brother Jonathan C.Gibbs (who would serve as secretary of state in Florida during Reconstruction),became a caprentener's apprentice,and subsequently a journeyman contractor.During the 1840s Mifflin aided fugitive slaves by participating in local Underground Railroad efforts and worked with its famous conductor William Grant Still.It was through this work that he became acquainted with with the preeminent black abolitionist Frederick Douglass,accompanying him on an 1849 tour of New York.During this tour Mifflin learned that gold had been discovered in California,and set out to find his fortune.Reaching San Francisco in 1850,he decided that more money could be made in business than in panning for gold.Consequently,along with a black partner,Peter Lester,he established a clothing and dry goods store.His business prospered,and he quickly became a well-known and successful entrepreneur.He also kept up his interest in the abolitionist movement,attending three state black conventions (1854,1855,1857) and in 1855 purchasing and becoming the editor of a local black antislavery newspaper,the Mirror of the Times.During an economic recession in the United States in 1857-1858,Mifflin followed a new gold rush to Victoria British Coloumbia,Canada,where he opened another store.He briefly returned to the United States in 1859 to marry Maria A.Alexander,a former Oberlin student who became the mother of their five children.During the next decade he repeated his California business in Canada by speculating in real estate,becoming the director of the Queen Charlottee Island Anthracite Coal Company,and building a wharf and railroad spur to transport coal.His business ventures, brought him influence,and in 1866 he was elected to the first of two terms as a member of Victoria's Common Council.After the second term,disgruntled by the direction of local politics,he returned to the United States to complete a formal course in law at a business school in Oberlin, Ohio.Touring the southern states to find a suitable location to establish a law practice,Mifflin settled in the rapidly growing town of Little Rock,Arkansas,in 1871.Beginning as a lawyer, he was later appointed county attorney,and in 1873 he won election as municipal judge of Little Rock,reportedly the first black man in the nation to be so honored.In 1875 when the Democrats returned to power. Mifflin lost the judgeship,but he quickly rose to prominence in the Republican Party,attending national Republican state central committee from 1887 to 1897.In 1877 he was appointed by President Rutherford B.Hayes as register of the U.S. Land Office for the Little Rock District of Arkansas.He served in the land office for twelve years,the last four as receiver of public monies.In 1897 Mifflin was appointed U.S. consul to Tamatave Madagascar (1897-1901).In 1901 he returned to Arkansas  and the next year published Shadow and Light an Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century,a lively account of his life and times,with an introduction by the famous black leader Booker T.Washington.That Booker would introduced the book was no accident;Mifflin epitomized Washington's self-help philosophy.In Little Rock,Mifflin not only speculated in real estate but eventually owned a number of brick office buildings and rental properties.In 1903 he became president of the city's  Capital City Savings Bank (it failed after five years)and later bought shares in several local companies while becoming a partner in the Little Rock Electric Light Company.He was also an active member of the National Negro Business League,founded by Booker to encourage entrepreneurship among African-Americans.Closely Although closely tied to the Republican machine in Arkansas,Mifflin fought for equal rights for blacks and supported emigration from the South as a cure for racial oppression (a radical stance in the late 1870s.)After Theodore Roosevelt summarily dismissed black soldiers accused of inciting a race riot in Brownsville Texas in 1906,he abandoned the Republican Party and endorsed the Democrat William Jennings Bryan for the presidency.The common thread linking these diverse elements was Mifflin commitment to what he termed "the progress of the race."He fought for equality and fair treatment,he believed that property acquisition and education were the keys to racial advancement and that African-Americans should establish a skilled middle class in order to complete in the marketplace.During the last decade of his life,using the income from his rental properties,he lived quietly and comfortably in Little Rock.After an illness of several months,he died at his home.