Jonathan C. Gibbs
Several black men became politically prominent during Reconstruction, particularly in Gainesville where many black troops mustered out of the Union Army and chose to remain in Alachua County. Jonathan C. Gibbs was one of these men. Gibbs was one of the most accomplished and politically driven men among them, becoming among the most influential African Americans during Reconstruction.
He was born in 1827 in Philadelphia of free parents. After his father, a Methodist minister, died, he was apprenticed to learn the carpentry trade which he followed until he was of adult age. Meanwhile, he had joined the Presbyterian Assembly and studied at Dartmouth. Following his Dartmouth graduation, Gibbs studied for two years at Princeton Theological Seminary, later becoming the pastor of a Philadelphia church. After the Civil War, Gibbs was sent to North Carolina as a missionary to blacks. In addition to ministering to their religious needs, he opened a private school for freedmen.
In late 1867 Gibbs moved to Florida and was elected to the state constitutional convention of 1868. He aligned himself with the radical faction of the Republican Party, although his speeches were usually temperate. Gibbs was one of the outstanding blacks at the convention. A New York Tribune correspondent wrote of him, “I suppose there is no fitter man in the Convention, white or black.” The writer described Gibbs as being of medium size, with “a good intelligent, yellow African face.” He was said to be “active in body and intellect, well educated, and an orator by nature, not a roarer but a convincing, argumentative, pleasant speaker, in this respect the most talented man in the Convention.”
In 1868, Governor Harrison Reed presented Gibbs’s name to the Florida Senate for appointment as Secretary of State, but his name was incorrectly presented. Reed withdrew the nomination and, for some reason, did not resubmit it. Later in the year, Reed appointed Gibbs Secretary of State after the first appointee, George J. Alden, a white Unionist, joined the Governor’s enemies in an attempt to impeach him. Gibbs was a trusted public servant and worked closely with Reed. When Ossian B. Hart succeeded Governor Reed in January 1873, he appointed Gibbs Superintendent of Public Instruction. As Superintendent, Gibbs was also president of the board of trustees of the proposed agricultural college for blacks, which came to be Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College, and later Florida A&M University.
Gibbs demonstrated that he was very much interested in developing public education in Florida. During his tenure, he closely supervised county superintendents. He made progress in the adoption of uniform texts in the schools. Prior to his coming to office, each student used whatever books he could obtain. Gibbs’s sudden death on August 14, 1874, was a great loss to Florida. The white man who became Superintendent of Public Instruction after Gibbs’s death said, “Negroes have lost one of their noblest representatives, our State one of its most valued citizens, and our public school system one of its most intelligent advocates—one of its best friends.”
The circumstances of his death became mired in controversy. Although his brother would later report that Gibbs died of apoplexy, it was believed by some that he had been poisoned. Gibbs was a powerful black man in Florida when it was a dangerous thing to be a powerful black man in Florida. He was the most visible, and possibly the most resented, black leader in the state, in no small measure due to his exceptional abilities. He was a prime example of what Southern whites at the time called an “uppity nigger.”
Gibbs carried the role well. On top of his game, dressed in the finery of the times, he cut a dashing, handsome figure on the streets of Tallahassee. Many Conservative Democrats loathed the sight of black men like Gibbs who, they thought, were propped up by Northern radical Republicans and carpetbaggers. He would have been the ideal target for elimination.
Only hours before his death, Gibbs gave an hours-long speech at a Republican Party meeting, after which he enjoyed a hearty meal. Then he went home and ensconced himself in his attic, which he had turned into what his brother later described as an arsenal. He apparently feared for his life. Poisoning was a commonly used weapoof murder in the nineteenth century. Even kings and emperors feared it. Some potential targets required food-tasters to imbibe before touching their meals. Although there is no definitive evidence that Gibbs was murdered by poisoning, “It was whispered and widely believed he had been poisoned.”
It is possible, and some say probable, that Gibbs was poisoned by someone in his own party. Gibbs was a radical Republican with a good chance of winning a congressional seat. The moderate Republicans opposed him and had their own candidate. Some historians believe one of those Republican moderates may have had a hand in the murder. According to this historian, Gibbs had serious opponents within his own party who considered him to be too radical. “Gibbs was running for a congressional seat in opposition to a moderate Republican candidate. One of Gibbs’s Republican critics warned Gibbs to “watch his water bucket.”[1]Dunn, A History of Florida Through Black Eyes.
Edward Waters College, Jacksonville, Florida
Edward Waters College in Jacksonville is a historic black college in Florida. Following the Civil War, Reverend Charles H. Pearce, Presiding Elder of the AME Church, was sent to Florida in 1865 to establish the Church in the state. Pearce, observing the fast –paced social and political changes as a result of the Reconstruction era in north Florida, recognized the need to for public education for the newly released slaves.
He began to raise funds for a school which has evolved to what we now know as Edward Waters College. Courses were first offered at the elementary, high school college and seminary levels. In January 1870, the AME Church passed a resolution at its Tallahassee AME Conference to set aside church funds to support and expand the offerings of the school. The Conference named the school The Brown Theological Institute which was charted by the state legislature in 1872.
The school was closed for a decade. There followed a series of name changes and eventually a location change to Jacksonville. In 1883. The school was opened as the East Florida Conference High School and later named the East Florida Scientific and Divinity High School.
The city’s Mount Zion AME Church provided 10,000 dollars for a building fund. Within a decade, the school’s educational programs were expanded and the school was renamed Edward Waters College in 1892. It was named in honor of the third bishop of the AME Church, Edward Waters (1780-1847) who was born in West River, Missouri.
Florida’s First Black Congressman
Overcoming deep political divisions in the Florida Republican Party, Josiah Walls became the first African American to serve his state in Congress. The only black Representative from Florida until the early 1990s, Walls was unseated twice on the recommendation of the House Committee on Elections. When he was not fiercely defending his seat in Congress, Walls fought for internal improvements for Florida. He also advocated compulsory education and economic opportunity for all races: “We demand that our lives, our liberties, and our property shall be protected by the strong arm of our government, that it gives us the same citizenship that it gives to those who it seems would … sink our every hope for peace, prosperity, and happiness into the great sea of oblivion.”
Josiah Thomas Walls was born into slavery in Winchester, Virginia, on December 30, 1842. He was suspected to be the son of his master, Dr. John Walls, and maintained contact with him throughout his life. When the Civil War broke out, Walls was forced to be the private servant of a Confederate artilleryman until he was captured by Union soldiers in May 1862. Emancipated by his Union captors, Walls briefly attended the county normal school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. By July 1863, Josiah Walls was serving in the Union Army as part of the 3rd Infantry Regiment of United States Colored Troops (USCT) based in Philadelphia. His regiment moved to Union–occupied northern Florida in February 1864. The following June, he transferred to the 35th Regiment USCT, where he served as the first sergeant and artillery instructor. While living in Picolota, Florida, Walls met and married Helen Fergueson, with whom he had one daughter, Nellie. He was discharged in October 1865 but decided to stay in Florida, working at a saw mill on the Suwannee River and, later, as a teacher with the Freedmen’s Bureau in Gainesville. By 1868, Walls had saved enough money to buy a 60–acre farm outside the city.
One of the few educated black men in Reconstruction–Era Florida, Walls was drawn to political opportunities available after the war. He began his career by representing north–central Florida’s Alachua County in the 1868 Florida constitutional convention. That same year, Walls ran a successful campaign for state assemblyman. The following fall, he was elected to the state senate and took his seat as one of five freedmen in the 24–man chamber in January 1869. Josiah Walls attended the Southern States Convention of Colored Men in 1871 in Columbia, South Carolina.After gaining traction in 1867, the Florida Republican Party disintegrated into factions controlled by scalawags and carpetbaggers—each group fighting for the loyalty of a large constituency of freedmen. The disorganized GOP faced another grim situation when their nominating convention met in August 1870. The three previous years would be remembered as the apex of anti–black violence in the state, orchestrated by the well–organized Jacksonville branches of the Ku Klux Klan. In the face of such unrestrained intimidation, Florida freedmen were widely expected to avoid the polls on Election Day. Fearing conservative Democrats would capture the election in the absence of the black vote, state GOP party leaders—a group made up entirely of white men from the scalawag and carpetbagger factions—agreed that nominating a black man to the state’s lone At–Large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives would renew black voters’ courage and faith in the Republican Party. Passing over the incumbent, former Union soldier Representative Charles Hamilton, the state convention delegates advanced the names of their favorite black candidates. Fierce competition between the nominees led to unruly debate as well as attempts to cast fraudulent votes, and almost resulted in rioting. Walls’s reputation as an independent politician who would not fall under the control of a single faction gave him the edge, and the convention selected him for the party’s nomination on the 11th ballot. The narrow victory was not encouraging for Walls. In the general election, he would confront not only Democratic opposition but also the doubts of his own party..Walls faced former slave owner and Confederate veteran Silas L. Niblack in the general election. Niblack immediately attacked Walls’s capabilities, arguing that a former slave was not educated enough to serve in Congress. Walls countered these charges by challenging his opponent to a debate and speaking at political rallies throughout northern Florida (the most populous section of the state). The campaign was violent; a would–be assassin’s bullet missed Walls by inches at a Gainesville rally, and Election Day was tumultuous. As one Clay County observer noted, Florida had been “turned upside down with politics and the election.” Walls emerged victorious, taking just 627 more votes than Niblack out of the more than 24,000 cast. After presenting his credentials on March 4, 1871, he was immediately sworn in to the 42nd Congress (1871–1873) and given a seat on the Committee on the Militia.
Niblack quickly contested the election. He provided solid evidence that the canvassers who rejected Democratic ballots in at least eight counties throughout the state were not legally allowed to do so; their job had been limited to counting votes. Walls claimed that he had lost more votes due to voter intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan in several northeastern counties, but he had little tangible evidence to support this claim. Walls was in office for nearly two years before the House Committee on Elections ruled on his case. The Republican majority declared Niblack the winner on January 29, 1873—a rare case in which the committee decided with the candidate from the minority party. Despite his loss, Walls’s congressional career was not over. In November 1872, he had won one of the two Florida At–Large seats in the 43rd Congress (1873–1875). In the four–way race, the top–two vote getters won a seat. Walls was just 34 votes shy of carpetbagger Republican William Purman. Niblack, running as a Conservative, was third. Walls returned to Congress when it convened in December 1873, receiving an additional assignment: to the Committee on Expenditures in the Navy Department.
Walls spent much of the 42nd and 43rd Congresses advancing the political and economic interests of his Florida constituents. Even Jacksonville’s Democratic Florida Union praised Walls’s efforts on behalf of the state, declaring, “Mr. Walls adds his mite to what has gone before and does it well.” He affectionately referred to Florida as “my own sunny state,” in an attempt to promote the potential of his new home for tourism and farming.
Walls presented resolutions for statewide internal improvements including the construction of telegraph lines, customhouses, courthouses, and post offices. He sought funding to improve Florida’s harbors and rivers and to create a land–grant state agricultural college. In an 1872 tariff bill, Walls also fought to protect Florida’s orchards from foreign competition. Most of Walls’s measures failed to make it out of committee, but he had more success passing private bills (those submitted for the benefit of an individual). He managed to gain pensions for Seminole War veterans who fought several battles against Native Americans in Florida throughout the early 19th century.
Walls feared the cause of public education would languish if it were left to the states. During the 43rd Congress, he enthusiastically supported a measure to establish a national education fund financed by the sale of public land. Walls addressed this issue in his first major floor speech on February 3, 1872: “I believe that the national Government is the guardian of the liberties of all its subjects,” Walls said. “Can [African Americans] protect their liberties without education; and can they be educated under the present condition of society in the States where they were when freed? Can this be done without the aid, assistance, and supervision of the General Government? No, sir, it cannot.” The bill passed with amendments protecting a state’s right to segregated education and granting states greater control over the distribution of federal funds, but the money was never appropriated. Walls’s support for education was further frustrated when the Civil Rights Bill—a battered piece of legislation seeking to eliminate discrimination in public accommodations, first introduced in 1870—came to a vote in February 1875. Opponents managed to excise a clause calling for equal educational opportunities just before the measure came to a vote. Walls was so displeased, he abstained from voting on the final bill on February 5, 1875. Submitting a speech to the Congressional Record Appendix just one month after the civil rights vote, Walls assessed the future of the South as Reconstruction began to deteriorate: “I reluctantly confess, after so many years of concessions that unless partisan and sectional feeling shall lose more of its rancor in the future than has been experienced in the past, fundamental law will be disregarded, overthrown, and trampled under foot, and a complete reign of terror and anarchy will rule supreme.”
For the 1874 campaign, Florida was split into two congressional districts, and Walls ran in a district covering the eastern half of the peninsula. Nearly the entire population of the new district, which was more than half black, lived between Walls’s home in north–central Florida and Jacksonville, on the Atlantic Coast.
The state Republican Party remained fractured, and an economic depression further endangered its grip on the state government. Walls returned to Florida after the 43rd Congress to maximize his personal wealth and to muster local political strength for the coming election. He succeeded in both goals. Using his congressional salary, Walls purchased a cotton plantation formerly owned by Confederates. That same year, he was admitted to the Florida bar (legal training was not required in some rural states) and bought the Gainesville New Era newspaper. Walls used the New Era to campaign for his renomination. In his first editorial, Walls promised to focus on internal improvements and to address the “wants and interests of the people of color,” loosely defined as education, thrift, and industry. His local popularity soared, and district Republicans nominated him on the first ballot in August 1874.In the general election, Walls faced Conservative candidate Jesse J. Finley, a Tennessee native and pre–Civil War member of the Whig Party. Voters divided almost entirely along racial lines; Walls topped Finley by a slim margin of 371 votes out of nearly 17,000 cast, taking 51 percent. He was sworn in to the 44th Congress and assigned to the Committee on Mileage.
Once again Walls was confronted by a challenge to his seat. Finley contested the election, claiming that ballots from several precincts where Walls resided in Alachua County had been miscounted. Finley supporters also claimed that other Alachua County votes were illegal because the eligibility oath was executed improperly (Florida law required this oath from voters whose names did not appear on the precinct’s list). Finley also accused Walls’s black political ally W. U. Saunders of impersonating a federal marshal at one of the polling places to protect and encourage black voters. Furthermore, Finley supporters suspected Walls’s votes in one Columbia County precinct had been tampered with by GOP state senate candidate E. G. Johnson. With Democrats now in power in the House, the Committee on Elections reported 8 to 3 against Walls. As the debate moved to the House Floor, Democratic Speaker Michael Kerr of Indiana allocated time to Members during the two–day discussion. Not one of Walls’s six black colleagues was allowed to speak, although Walls briefly took the floor in his own defense. On April 19, 1876, the House adopted the committee report, 135 to 84, with 71 abstentions (including Representatives Robert Smalls of South Carolina and Charles Nash of Louisiana). Walls returned to Florida a week later and, in August 1876, Republican Horatio Bisbee defeated his attempt at renomination.
In November 1876, Walls won a seat in the Florida state senate, where he championed his cause of compulsory public education. Ultimately frustrated by the futility of Republican politics after the collapse of Reconstruction, he took a permanent leave of absence in February 1879. The opportunity to face his old foe Bisbee for the Republican nomination to a Florida U.S. House seat lured him back into politics in 1884. He lost and then ran unsuccessfully in the general election as an Independent candidate. In 1890, Walls lost another bid for the state senate. In 1885, his wife, Helen Fergueson Walls, died and Josiah Walls married her young cousin, Ella Angeline Gass.
His successful farm was destroyed when his crops froze in February 1895. Walls subsequently took charge of the farm at Florida Normal College (now Florida A&M University), until his death in Tallahassee on May 15, 1905. Josiah Walls had fallen into such obscurity, no Florida newspaper published his obituary.
The Jim Crow Era (1877-1954)
Following the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s southern whites (Democrats) regained control of the state as federal troops that had protected black rights were prematurely removed from the South and Republican Party power declined rapidly. Segregationists set up a system of education based upon what was called the Jim Crow system. Under that system black children were not permitted to attend schools with white children.as long as equal educational opportunities were available to them in segregated schools.
That system, which remained in place until struck down by the Court in 1954, was based upon a United States Supreme Court ruling in 1896 (the year Miami was founded) in the infamous Plessey. v Ferguson case that made race segregation, including in schools, legal in the United States.[2]Dunn, Black Education in Florida, p.28.
Dr. Johnny L. Jones: Fallen Black Star
Dr. Johnny L. Jones, from Greenville, North Carolina, was Miami-Dade County’s first black school superintendent. He was appointed to the post in May 1977. Jones consolidated power quickly bringing many blacks, including some personal friends, into powerful positions in the school district. He was an impeccable dresser and among other distinctions was a member of the Orange Bowel Committee. Dr. Jones became an advocate for poor and minority children. For example, he stopped outdoor suspensions from school which effected a disproportionate number of black students and pressed hard to improve minority schools.
Dr. Jones was swept from power in 1979 after being charged with misusing school funds to buy gold plated plumbing for a vacation home he was building in Naples, Florida. In 1985 his conviction in what became known as “the gold plumbing case”, was reversed by the Third District Court of Appeals because the state excluded blacks from the jury, an act that infuriated blacks and added to the tensions leading up to the great riot of 1980. Dr. Jones was later convicted on a separate bribery charge.
The common belief that Dr. Johnny L. Jones was the first black to rise to such heights in the Dade school system is incorrect. Over a century before Jones was appointed, two blacks served in positions in the Dade school system that were higher than what Jones achieved. In 1868, during Reconstruction (1866-1877) when blacks had temporary political power in the South, two freed slaves, Andrew Price and Octavius Aimar, were appointed to positions in the school system. Price was appointed school board chairman and Aimer was appointed as a county commissioner and member of the school board.
I hasten to add that neither man could read or write and were appointed by an unpopular carpetbagger named William H. Gleason who was serving as lieutenant governor. Gleason was an opportunistic power-grabbing man who was resented by local whites who had been cheated out of land and money by Gleason who merely used Price and Aimer for his own purposes. That said, Johnny Jones was the first black to exercise real power in the Miami-Dade Public School System. He died on December 3, 1993. He was the epitome of the black fallen star.
The Economic Oppression of Blacks
Ironically, one of the goals of Reconstruction was to get land into the hands of former slaves. This was to be accomplished through the passage of the Homestead Act of 1866. The federal government planned to distribute state-owned lands in five states to freedmen and to the few loyal white Southerners who did not support the Confederacy. The land was to be distributed in eighty-acre farms. Ex-Confederates were ineligible to apply. In Florida, the land office responsible for distributing land to blacks opened in August, 1866. Three thousand blacks filed claims. The law was repealed two years later at which time 2,012 blacks had been given land, and altogether they had received only 160,960 acres. Southern whites actively worked to prevent blacks from getting land ownership and often used intimidation to force some blacks to abandon their homesteads or sell them to whites.
The discussion about black land ownership began even before the war was over. In January, 1865, twenty black ministers were summoned to Savannah to meet with Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton and Major General William T. Sherman. The General and the Secretary desired to know what the former slaves wanted most when the war ended. The response from the ministers was unequivocal. Land! They asked that blacks be given land which they could work until they were able to buy it, with the goal being black economic independence from whites. As a result of this advice, Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 which set aside 400,000 acres of confiscated land to be distributed to the heads of slave families. Sherman threw in some “broken-down mules” as a bonus. This was the origin of the often repeated saying among blacks that they are owed “forty acres and a mule.[3]Dunn, A History of Florida Through Black Eyes, p.2.