Every day this month, the Center for Black Educator Development, in partnership with Education Post and Philly’s 7th Ward, will highlight a Black Educator Hall of Famer.
But, don’t forget, e’ry month is Black History Month and February is just the Blackest. All year are ongoing opportunities to learn and teach and the colossal impact Black educators have had on society.
Today, our featured Black educator is John Wesley Gilbert.
John Wesley Gilbert was born on July 6, 1863, in Hephzibah, GA. Although his parents were at one point enslaved, Gilbert was born free. As a youth, he worked on the farm with his parents although he did attend school. Gilbert received his early education in Augusta’s segregated public schools, he encountered remarkable teachers, including Lucy Craft Laney, Georgia’s most famous Black woman educator. Gilbert even served as a teacher’s assistant.
He describes his early education thus, “Six months of the year, I ploughed, hoed, picked cotton, split rails, and spent the other six months in the public schools of Augusta.”
After high school, Gilbert enrolled at Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. Gilbert, the college’s first student, attended for 2 years where he studied foreign languages including Greek. His mentor at Paine, MECS minister George Williams Walker, tutored Gilbert in Greek and helped him win admission to Brown University, where he transferred as a junior. Gilbert was Brown’s third Black graduate and one of only about forty African Americans to graduate from a northern college or university between 1885 and 1889.
After receiving his bachelor’s, Gilbert continued his education at Brown University. While attending Brown University, Gilbert received a scholarship to attend the American School of Classics, in Athens, Greece. Gilbert — who mastered French, German, classical and modern Greek, Latin, and the African languages Otetela and Tshiluba — was among the first Americans of any ethnicity to do professional archaeological work in Greece, the Mediterranean, or Near East.
During one of those excavations, Gilbert found walls, gates, and pillars that led to the discovery of the ancient Greek city of Eretria, including the excavation of the so-called “tomb of Aristotle.” Gilbert’s work in Greece won him an A.M. degree from Brown in 1891—the first advanced degree the school awarded to an African American—in archaeology. Gilbert became the first African American archaeologist. Later, Gilbert attended Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta and received his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1896.
As an educator, Gilbert had an extensive career. As previously mentioned, he served as a teaching assistant, as a high school student. Upon receiving his master’s degree from Brown, Gilbert returned to Augusta and began teaching at Paine College. He taught Greek, Latin, English, French, German, and Hebrew. He was the first Black professor at Paine and taught there for more than 30 years. He was remembered at Paine most of all as “an exacting teacher” who “would not tolerate weak excuses,” since “he knew from personal experience that only diligence and plain hard work produced scholars.”
Additionally, Gilbert completed a missions trip to the Congo and served as president of Miles College before returning to Paine to serve as the Dean of the Divinity School.
John Wesley Gilbert; a member of the Black Educator Hall of Fame.
For more information on John Wesley Gilbert, visit the following site.
