I have previously written about John Wesley Gilbert, the early Black archaeologist and classicist and the first African-American to receive a graduate degree from Brown. Recent work, especially by John W. I. Lee, has focused on Gilbert’s life in the discipline of classics, and especially at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. But Gilbert’s thought and actions reflected not just his situation at Brown and in the discipline of classics. He was also an important participant in various debates among black intellectuals around the turn of the century. Thus, we see his name brought up repeatedly in the 1890s and the 1900s in prominent African-American newspapers and journals. For instance, Gilbert was widely acclaimed in 1891 as a symbol of black success. Take the following short notice included in the 1891 issue of The Appeal, a Midwestern African-American newspaper:
One colored young man, John Wesley Gilbert, of Georgia, has gone to Athens to enter the American school there. He will find very little race prejudice in that classic land.
([‘One colored young man…’] 1891)
At this time in his life, Gilbert was seen as successfully escaping the conditions of slavery he was trapped in at birth — by joining the prestigious (and overwhelmingly white) institution of classics and archaeology and attending the (entirely white) institution of Brown.
Gilbert’s reception changed significantly later in his life, as he became known for his ideas — not just his academic success. We thus see a scathing article published in 1909 in the same newspaper, The Appeal (‘A Reverend Flunkey’ 1909). The authors were reacting to a speech Gilbert gave to the Arkansas Southern Methodist conference. The Associated Press reported that Gilbert said that “the teachers sent down from the North know nothing of the real need of his race, and, that as a result, a false perspective was given his people.” For The Appeal (editorializing the AP excerpt) Northern missionaries instead “inspired in the Afro-American a spirit of manhood which led him to aspire to higher and better things.” In prose dripping with sarcasm, the newspaper notes that it is this “unfortunate tendency” of northern missionaries that “Rev. Gilbert is laboring to reform.” Gilbert, they say, is aligning himself with “those eminent statesmen, Tillman and Vardaman” and Senator Stone — all notoriously racist legislators. For The Appeal, not only was Gilbert betraying black dreams by giving cover for Jim Crow, but his program of interracial partnership would in fact “make the Afro-American … just as he was in the times of slavery, perfectly willing to accept the white man as massa.”
These strong words reflect divisions in black thought at the time. Gilbert belonged to the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME). This church was formed in 1870 from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which had in turn split from the (northern) Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844 over the issue of slavery. Gilbert’s church remained strongly opposed to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), denominations based in the North that preached a “gospel of freedom.” Reginald Hildebrand argues that the CME comprised “black traditionalists … [who] had mastered the intricacies of southern racial diplomacy … [and] saw relationships between white and black southerners as cords of stability in a world that had become tumultuous and unpredictable” (Hildebrand 1995: 21). Indeed, CME leadership proscribed political activity, cooperated with white Methodists, and focused on black education in an attempt to “retain some of the traditions of antebellum paternalism” (Hildebrand 1995: xxiv).
John Wesley Gilbert’s outlook was always intertwined with this religious background. Indeed, he was named after the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Paine College was founded by the MECS and the CME in 1882 as an “interracial” venture for the education of blacks. Thus, as both a student and an educator Gilbert lived the “Paine College ideal,” which was both an “extension of the plantation mission ideology of paternalism” (Eskew 1992: 651) and a “practical model for racial comity … for the mutual benefit of both races” (Sommerville 2004: 55). Nowhere is this better argued than in J. C. Colclough’s The Spirit of John Wesley Gilbert. Colclough outlines the “Gilbert program … in the following sentences: No two races can live together, interlarded, under the same laws, but with different race marks and proclivities, in anything like peace without a program of ‘good will’ and interracial understanding” (Colclough 1925: 29–30).
It was precisely this “Gilbert program” that was excoriated by other members of the black community. Just a few months after The Appeal wrote that “Rev. (?) Gilbert is a flunkey who deserves the contempt of every self-respecting Afro-American,” a journal edited by W. E. B. Du Bois also criticized Gilbert. In a section entitled “The Out-Look: Digest of the Daily and Periodical Press,” L. M. Hershaw wrote about Gilbert’s speech before the North Carolina Conference of the MECS. Hershaw remarked that in an address
containing many excellent passages, Prof John W. Gilbert, while making a plea for the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man, had to interlard the following: “I do not mean to imply that there ought to be any social equality in this matter.” Think of this! No “social equality” between the children of a common father! This sort of talk from men professing the religion of Jesus, to other men professing the same religion shows how hollow our American life is. … If men say they will neither accept nor practice the precepts of Christianity, all right. That is their privilege. There is no quarrel with them. But if they profess to accept and practice these precepts, and at the same time indulge in senseless drivel about “social equality,” they merit the anathema of Him who said: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.”
(Hershaw 1910: 5)
Hershaw criticizes Gilbert as one among many “men professing the religion of Jesus.” On the one hand, these men (including Gilbert) profess the principles of Christianity that Hershaw interprets as requiring social equality. On the other hand, men like Gilbert explicitly deny aspirations to “social equality.” For Hershaw, this is effectively hypocrisy. Like the scribes and Pharisees, Gilbert travels the earth “to make one proselyte” but then makes him a “child of hell.” Hershaw effectively calls Gilbert a hypocrite because of his adherence to the Paine College ideal of interracial partnership. This may reflect a broader split over the purposes of education for African-Americans. Whereas Booker T. Washington (here aligning with Gilbert) emphasized the importance of technical, vocational training for African-Americans, Du Bois (here represented by Hershaw) came to the defense of liberal, humanistic education (see, for instance, Roth 2014: 62–78). It is ironic that in 1891, Gilbert was praised for his success in just such classical formation — only to be lambasted eighteen years later for purportedly devaluing such an education for other African-Americans.
Gilbert’s religious outlook would remain influential throughout his life — perhaps nowhere more so than in his mission to the Congo in 1911 and 1912. He travelled there with Walter Russell Lambuth, a (white) bishop of the MECS. By all accounts, their relationship was excellent. Lambuth believed that southern Methodists were suited to successfully evangelize Africa: “We are born and brought up with black men. They understand us, and we understand them. We understand their good qualities and their bad qualities.” Gilbert agreed, and further stressed the unique suitability of black Methodists: “Africa needs thousands of teachers, graduates of Atlanta, Fisk, Moorehouse, Paine, and similar institutions; for, besides possessing by nature the race instinct, they are better suited physically for work in Africa than their white brethren” (Gilbert 1914: 132).
Gilbert and Lambuth successfully established a church and school in the village of Wembo-Nyama. This very school (supported by American Methodists to this day) would later educate Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and an icon of anticolonialism and pan-Africanism (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2014: 16). On the one hand, then, we have a clearly colonial mission. Not only did Gilbert and Lambuth subscribe to the doctrine of Christianity as a civilizing force, but even the indigenous people they worked with were lackeys to the Belgian colonial authorities: Chief Wembo Nyama, after whom the village was named, was “imposed by the colonial administration on peoples for whom traditional political authority was organized along clan divisions” (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2014: 15). This complex of circumstances — an African-American on a colonial mission, fostering anticolonial resistance — reminds us that (as la paperson writes) “colonial schools are machines running on desires for a colonizer’s future and, paradoxically, desires for Indigenous futures.” After all, colonial schools “have a tradition of harboring spaces of anticolonial resistance,” from the British schools in Kenya that hatched the Mau Mau revolutionaries to the Indian schools in settler colonial North America that birthed Indian resistance movements (paperson 2017).
paperson’s analysis is also true for the Congo: African-American missionaries fomented sufficient resistance that by the 1920s Belgian colonial authorities refused to issue any more permits to black missionaries (Jacobs 2002; Tickle 2009). Indeed, there were “persistent rumors that the Belgian government was not highly cordial to Gilbert’s return” (Calhoun 1961: 135). How do we position Gilbert within this tangle of colonialism? He was no anticolonial fighter. After all, the mission exemplified the Paine College ideal of interracial partnership he devoted his life to. Later in his life, Gilbert would proudly repeat that when travelling with Lambuth “into the interior he [Gilbert] always went in front, so that his black breast might be the first to meet danger and to form a protection to his white friend” (Pinson 1925: 128). Gilbert shared similar anecdotes in many speeches he gave about his mission once he returned to the United States. It is tempting to imagine just how The Horizon or The Appeal would have criticized one of these speeches; Gilbert never abandoned the ideals that made him so controversial amongst the black community of his time.
The mission to the Congo also demonstrates other parts of Gilbert that were central to his life: education and languages. In letters home, Lambuth lauded Gilbert:
For sincerity of purpose, high character, and noble ideals, he has few equals and surely no superior. As a diligent student of Greek, French, and native African languages, he surpassed anything I met with upon our long journey on land and sea.
(Pinson 1925: 126)
Gilbert spoke better French than Lambuth, so he took Lambuth’s dictation for all the letters to the Belgian authorities. Lambuth wrote that
the Colonial Minister, upon my subsequent visit to Brussels, inquired who wrote the letters, and remarked that they were the most correct and elegantly expressed among those received at his office from one who was not a native of either France or Belgium.
(Pinson 1925: 127)
Furthermore, during his mission work Gilbert compiled a vocabulary and grammar for Tetela, a local indigenous language (Gilbert 1912). Gilbert considered languages essential to fulfilling what he called the “Southern Negro’s debt and responsibility to Africa”; in a 1914 speech he said that “Africa is calling for teachers — especially those possessing linguistic ability” (Gilbert 1914: 132).
Gilbert’s lifelong passion (and talent) for education and languages undergirded his work in religion and in classics. At Paine, he taught five languages: French, German, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. Gilbert was remembered at Paine partly because he was the first black faculty member. His appointment in 1888 led to the resignation of a white professor, who decried “the evil” in this “revolutionary measure” (Calhoun 1961: 16). But perhaps Gilbert’s most significant legacy was as a teacher, and especially an instructor of the classics. An article commemorating Paine’s centenary remarked that Gilbert’s new classes in Greek and Latin “paved the way for Paine’s eventual elevation from a teaching school with a Normal department to college level.” George E. Clary Jr., a professor at Paine, said that “this was to be a college, and to be a college, you had to teach Greek and Latin” (‘Paine’s 100-Year Story’ 1982). Gilbert was also remembered 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” (Calhoun 1961: 17). His students recalled anecdotes of his firmness:
the exacting scholar corrected a startled student for his use of a Greek verb. The student, abashed, protested, “But that’s exactly the way it is in the textbook.” Gilbert, they report, replied, “Then the textbook is wrong. Bring it here.” The textbook was wrong as Gilbert immediately pointed out to the publisher. It was changed in the next edition.
(Calhoun 1961: 17)
Gilbert also believed that “true greatness is humility.” Students of his would remember, for instance, him saying: “If you would like to realize your own importance put your finger in a bowl of water, take it out, and look at the hole” (Calhoun 1961: 17). It was Gilbert as an educator and teacher of languages who was remembered at Paine and elsewhere.
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