Notable Florida African Americans

Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs

Above: Portrait of Secretary of State Jonathan C. Gibbs, rc00407. Florida Memory. State Archives of Florida.

Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs was the first African-American Secretary of State and Superintendant of Public Instruction in Florida, and one of the most powerful African-American officeholders in Florida politics during Reconstruction.

Gibbs was born free in Philadelphia in 1828. He and his brothers attended a Free School as children, but were forced to start working when their father died. Although anti-black and anti-abolitionist sentiments were the norm in this period, Gibbs was able to open the doors of opportunity for himself. A church scholarship sent him to Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire, and from there he went to Dartmouth. Although the president of the school was pro-slavery, several African-American students were admitted to the school in the years before the Civil War; Gibbs was the third African-American man to graduate from Dartmouth. The Princeton Theological Seminary followed, and although Gibbs didn’t graduate, he was ordained in 1856. He became active in the abolitionist and underground railroad movements in Philadelphia, and in 1865 went to the Carolinas to do missionary work with freed people. 1868 found him involved in Florida politics; that year he was one of eighteen African-Americans elected to the State Constitutional Convention. Governor Harrison Reed appointed him as Florida’s Secretary of State from 1868 to 1872, and in 1872 Gibbs also served as a Tallahassee City Councilman. In 1873, Governor Ossian Hart appointed Gibbs Superintendant of Public Instruction. As Superintendant, he made many important contributions in Florida’s public school system.

Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs died on August 14, 1874, of a stroke.

Josiah Thomas Walls

Above: Portrait of Congressman Josiah Thomas Walls, rc00830. Florida Memory. State Archives of Florida.

Josiah Thomas Walls was Florida's first African-American representative to serve in Congress.

Walls was born a slave in Winchester, Virginia, in 1842. He was forced to join the Confederate army, but was released from this service after their capture at Yorktown by Union troops in 1862. The next year Walls joined the U.S. Colored Troops, where he rose to the rank of corporal. He was discharged in 1865 in Florida, where he stayed to become a teacher for the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1868 he was elected to be the Alachua County representative in the Florida Constitutional Convention, and in 1869 was one of five freedmen in the Florida senate.

In 1871 he was elected as the Florida representative to the 42nd Congress (1871-3), but the election was contested by his opponent, who was declared the winner in January of 1973. However, in November of 1872, Walls beat the same opponent for a seat in the 43rd Congress, and was assigned to the Committee on Expenditures in the Navy Department.

Walls was elected again in 1874 to the 44th Congress, and assigned to the Committee on Mileage, but once again his position was challenged by the losing opponent, and once again the opponent won. In the time he was in office, Walls worked towards improving Florida’s physical and governmental infrastructure, and did his best to defend and strengthenFlorida’s tourism and agriculture industries.

In 1876, Walls moved back to Florida, and months later won a seat in Florida’s state senate. He remained in and out of politics until his death in 1905.

Mary McLeod Bethune

Above: Mary McLeod Bethune picture, pr00753. Florida Memory. State Archives of Florida.

Mary Bethune was born in 1875 South Carolina to freed slaves, who sent her to a school for African-American children ran by a local church. Because of her love for learning, she was sponsored to attend Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. There she earned a scholarship to attend Moody Bible Institute, where she was the only African American student. She spent the next few years teaching throughout the south, sharing her enthusiasm for learning with young minds. She was not living her dream, however, which was to open a school for African-American girls, to teach them life skills as well as reading, writing, and arithmetic, and give them a chance to make something of themselves. So she moved to Daytona and bought a tiny, unfurnished house, the first building of the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School. Tuition was fifty cents a week, and she and her five students held bake sales to raise money and made do with the most barren and makeshift of furnishings and utensils. After a time, however, 14 buildings were spread across the 32-acre campus, including a farm which helped support her 400 students. In 1923 the school merged with the Cookman Institute, and the school stands today under the name Bethune-Cookman University.

Bethune was also incredibly politically active during her lifetime. Her passion for the voting rights of women led her to join the Equal Suffrage League. When the 19th Amendment was passed, she held night classes to teach illiterate African-Americans to read so that they could vote. She persisted in this despite being threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. She also opened her school library to the public—the only public library in Florida available to African-Americans in the early 19th century.

Bethune’s public service work lasted her entire career. She used her charisma and political sensibilities to speak out of the rights of African-Americans, especially African-American women. She was appointed to national government positions by Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt, and she used these connections to help secure more rights and opportunities for African-Americans. In 1974, a statue of her was placed in a public park in Washington, D.C.; she was the first woman and the first African-American to receive this honor.

Zora Neale Hurston

Above: Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville, Florida, rc10403. Florida Memory. State Archives of Florida.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 and lived in Eatonville, Florida, an African-American community. She was a writer and an anthropologist, documenting the lifestyle of African-Americans in Florida. As an active member of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston overcame gender and racial barriers and became an authority on black culture.  In the 1930s she worked for the Works Progress Administration, recording video and audio to preserve African-American folklife for future generations. She is best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes were Watching God. Her scholarship and creative works represented and affirmed pride in African-Americans.

Works Cited:

Online Encyclopedia. 2011. Gibbs, Jonathan Clarkson (1828-1874). http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/4255/Gibbs-Jonathan-Clarkson-1828-1874.html, accessed January 24, 2011.

Black Americans in Congress. Josiah Thomas Walls. http://baic.house.gov/member-profiles/profile.html?intID=17, accessed January 24, 2011.

University of South Carolina. 2002. Mary McLeod Bathune. http://www.usca.edu/aasc/bethune.htm, accessed January 24, 2011.

Further reading:

-Brown, Canter Jr.

1998 Florida's Black Public Officials, 1867-1924. Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press.

-Klingman, Peter D. 

1976 Josiah Walls: Florida's Black Congressman of Reconstruction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

-Marszalek, John F.

2006 A Black Congressman in the Age of Jim Crow: South Carolina’s George Washington Murray. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

-Evans, Stephanie Y.

2008 Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954:  An Intellectual History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

-McCluskey, Audrey Thomas, and Elaine M. Smith, eds.

2002 Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World, Essays and Selected. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

-Moylan, Virginia Lynne

2011 Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.