Shadow and Light: An Autobiography.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs. Shadow and Light: An Autobiography. Intros. by Booker T. Washington and Tom W. Dillard. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995. 372 pp. $15.00.

In 1902, year following the appearance of Booker T. Washington's popular Up From Slavery, his friend and admirer in Little Rock, Arkansas, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (1823-1915), published his autobiography under the title Shadow and Light. Washington wrote a brief, but flattering, introduction to the original edition. Tom W. Dillard, an authority on Gibbs and African-American history, introduces this Bison Books edition of Shadow and Light with a perceptive essay that places in historical perspective Gibbs's long career as an entrepreneur, attorney, politician, and diplomat. Even though Gibbs's work has received scant attention compared to that devoted to Up From Slavery, it provides an informative view of "practically the entire panorama of nineteenth-century African-American history," as Dillard appropriately observes.

In many respects the autobiographies of Gibbs and Washington are similar in form and message. Both are narratives of ascent--success stories--in the tradition of slave autobiographies in Which ascent referred to escaping bondage and arriving in a free state. The life-histories of Gibbs and Washington describe a different kind of ascent, one that chronicled the experiences of two individuals who transcended poverty and prejudice to rise above their origins. Like Washington's autobiography, Gibbs's Shadow and Light extols self-reliance and perseverance, exudes optimism, and exhibits race pride. Both Washington and Gibbs subscribed to the social Darwinian philosophy of the "survival of the fittest." Gibbs defined the triumph of the fittest as the reward of self-denial, hard work, and invincible determination. Philanthropy, however important to African-American progress, was, in his view, no substitute for self-help. Like Washington, Gibbs believed that the economic advancement of blacks held the key to their survival and progress and that "the best element of the white race" would lend its support by providing African Americans with industrial or vocational training. Gibbs, no less than Washington, found in his own career ample justification for such views.

But despite their similarities, the autobiographies of Gibbs and Washington exhibit significant differences. Gibbs employs a more florid, verbose writing style, is more inclined to move back and forth in time and to deliver what may be termed lessons from history, and includes extensive excerpts from newspapers and other publications. A keen observer of people and landscapes, he devotes lengthy passages to descriptions of both. Although his autobiography covers the first eighty years of his eventful life, more than a third of it is devoted to the years between 1897 and 1901, a relatively insignificant period in his career in which he traveled to and from Madagascar, the history of which he chronicles in his autobiography.

More significant perhaps are the differences in the contents of the autobiographies that resulted from the discrepancies in the ages, backgrounds, and experiences of Gibbs and Washington. Born free in Philadelphia, where he became associated with the city's black elite, Gibbs came of age in the era of the abolitionist movement and lived and worked in various sections of the United States and Canada during his first forty-eight years. His only direct contact with slavery was a brief visit as a youth to a Maryland plantation in the company of his white employer. In contrast Washington, who belonged to a younger generation, was born a slave five years before the outbreak of the Civil War and lived in Virginia (and West Virginia), except for a brief residence in the nation's capital until he moved to Alabama to assume charge of Tuskegee Institute. Though Gibbs was fully cognizant of the hostile racial climate in the post-Reconstruction South, his autobiography indicates that he never abandoned either his belief in the assimilation of blacks into the nation's society or his demand that they be accorded the right to vote. A Republican who frequently enjoyed the party's patronage, he nonetheless was more inclined toward political independence than his friend at Tuskegee and remained personally involved in party politics until his final years.

Clearly, Gibbs considered himself a self-made man, an African-American Horatio Alger, who through hard work, persistence, and willingness to seize every opportunity became a person of influence and considerable wealth. The sudden death of his father, a Methodist minister, forced him at a young age to assist in earning a livelihood for his family. Beginning as an apprentice carpenter, he ultimately became a prosperous contractor in Philadelphia. He also availed himself of opportunities to augment his meager education and participated in a variety of abolitionist activities in which he was closely associated with Frederick Douglass. The California gold rush prompted him to abandon Philadelphia in 1850 for San Francisco, where for eight years he engaged in the boot and shoe business. Not only did he prosper in business but he also played an important role in efforts to extend the civil rights of blacks in California. The rising tide of anti-black discrimination, coupled with the discovery of gold in British Columbia, caused Gibbs to move to Victoria, B.C., in 1858. During the next decade he rose to prominence in local politics, served on Victoria's common council, and amassed considerable wealth in his retail establishment as well as in real estate and coal mining. In 1859 he married Maria Alexander, an Oberlin-educated woman who became the mother of his five children, but his family receives only passing notice in the autobiography. The deterioration of the racial climate in Victoria prompted by the influx of white American gold miners ultimately led Gibbs to return to the United States in 1870 and to settle briefly in Oberlin, Ohio, where his family had already located and would remain, while Gibbs headed for another frontier--the Reconstruction South.

Gibbs attended a convention in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was profoundly impressed by several delegates from Arkansas. So impressed was he that in 1871 he settled in Little Rock, where he read law and quickly became a prominent member of the local bar. Two years later Gibbs was elected a municipal judge in Little Rock, the first African American in the nation to be elected to such a post, and was henceforth referred to as Judge Gibbs by both blacks and whites. Reflecting on the city a quarter of a century later, he wrote, "It can truly be said of Little Rock that the press and leading citizens have been more just and humane to her colored citizens than any other Southern city."

As Gibbs began his new career in Arkansas, state politics entered an especially turbulent and confused phase. A staunch Republican, Gibbs identified with the organization of Powell Clayton, the "boss" of the state s highly factionalized Republican party. Rising rapidly in party ranks, Gibbs was a delegate to every Republican national convention, except one, between 1876 and 1904 and served as secretary of the state's Republican Central Committee for a decade beginning in 1887. A succession of federal appointments that continued even after the collapse of Reconstruction and Republican ascendancy in Arkansas rewarded his loyalty and faithful service to the party. He spent a dozen years in the federal land office in Little Rock, first as Registrar and later as Receiver of Public Moneys. His last patronage plum came in 1897 when he was seventy-four years old: President William McKinley appointed him United States Consul to Tamatave, Madagascar, a drab post that placed few demands on his time, thereby allowing him time to complete a draft of his life-story. Few African Americans received more recognition from the Republican Party. Even fewer figured more prominently in so many movements dedicated to improving the lot of African Americans at local, state, and national levels.

Upon Gibbs's return to Arkansas in 1901, radical racism was at high tide, effectively closing politics as an avenue of advancement for blacks. As a consequence, Gibbs directed his attention to the promotion of African-American economic development. A theme running through his autobiography focuses precisely on this topic: In spite of Jim Crow stratagems and the violence directed against black citizens, he maintained, racial progress would continue in the same degree that blacks obtained education and wealth. By education Gibbs meant curricula designed to teach African-American youth a trade. An early and outspoken advocate of trade schools and industrial education, he insisted that such schools would lift "the race to a higher manhood and financial standing" and create a skilled, property-owning middle class. As this class increased, so would access to the political process. Putting into practice his own philosophy, Gibbs organized a black-owned bank in Little Rock in 1903. The bank lasted five years and ended in failure amid charges of fraud and mismanagement--a chapter in his life that occurred after the publication of Shadow and Light, but one that he surely would have considered the darkest shadow upon his career and reputation.