John Wesley Gilbert

John Wesley Gilbert (July 6, 1863 – November 18, 1923) was an American archaeologist, educator, and Methodist missionary to the Congo. Gilbert was the first graduate of Paine College, its first African-American professor, and the first African-American to receive an advanced degree from Brown University. Until he left Georgia, Gilbert "spent half the year on the farm and the other half in the public schools of the city of Augusta." After finishing public school, Gilbert enrolled in the Augusta Institute (later the Atlanta Baptist Seminary, a predecessor of Morehouse College). George Williams Walker, the MECS minister and president of Paine from 1884 to 1910, became a lifelong mentor to Gilbert; upon Walker's death in 1911, Gilbert wrote to Walker's widow that "Dear Dr. Walker…was as much of a father to me as he was a husband to you."

In 1886, Gilbert was given financial assistance to transfer into the junior class of Brown University. There, he was among the first ten black students to attend the school and among the forty African-Americans to graduate from any northern university between 1885 and 1889. He was the first African American to attend that school, and remained the only one to have done so through 1901. During his time in the country, Gilbert was given an award for "excellence" in Greek. His appointment was also important because of his classical education: as a Paine professor later put it, "this was to be a college, and to be a college, you had to teach Greek and Latin." Similarly, Lambuth argued 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." Lambuth and Gilbert cooperated well; Lambuth praised Gilbert's language skills, writing that his translations were "so well done 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." Gilbert's passion for languages and sense of the "Southern Negro's debt and responsibility to Africa" even led him to compile a vocabulary and grammar for Tetela, a language spoken in the area of their work.

John Wesley Gilbert with Bishop Lambuth of the MECS on their mission to the Belgian Congo.

Gilbert and Lambuth successfully established a church and school in the village of Wembo-Nyama. This school would later educate Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and an icon of anticolonialism and pan-Africanism.

Reception and legacy Gilbert was ill by 1921 and died on 18 November 1923 in Augusta, Georgia. Soon after his death, The Spirit of John Wesley Gilbert was published as a kind of eulogy. The author outlined 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."

Gilbert's contemporary reception and later legacy were complex. His beliefs in interracial partnership were controversial at the time. African-American newspapers and magazines — including The Horizon, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois — criticized his political views. The Appeal wrote that Gilbert would "make the Afro-American … just as he was in the times of slavery, perfectly willing to accept the white man as massa," going on to write that "in the opinion of THE APPEAL, Rev. (?) Gilbert is a flunkey who deserves the contempt of every self-respecting Afro-American."

Gilbert's alma mater, Paine College, dedicated a chapel in honor of him and Bishop Lambuth in 1968. In 1941, the city of Augusta built a low-income housing complex across the street from Paine College. In honor of Gilbert, the complex was named Gilbert Manor. The housing was closed in 2008 in order to make room for expansion of the Medical College of Georgia.

In 2020, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens named the newly renovated Student Center after Gilbert.