The First Black Archaeologist

Abstract This is the first full biography of John Wesley Gilbert (1863–1923), a pioneering African American scholar, archaeologist, teacher, civic leader, and missionary. The first part of the book traces Prof. Gilbert’s life from his birth into slavery in rural Georgia through his early education in the segregated public schools of Augusta, Georgia, on to his studies at the Augusta Institute and Atlanta Baptist Seminary (forerunners of Atlanta’s famed Morehouse College), at the Methodist-sponsored Paine Institute in Augusta, and at Brown University. Its central chapters focus on Gilbert’s sojourn in Greece during 1890–1891 as a member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a research institution founded in 1881 by a consortium of American colleges and universities. The book examines Gilbert’s relationships with his American School professors and classmates, his experiences of living in Greece, his topographical research on the urban demes (neighborhoods) of ancient Athens, and his archaeological work at the ancient Greek city of Eretria. The final portion of the book explores Gilbert’s life after Athens, as he earned a national reputation as an African American educational, civic, and religious leader. It examines his arduous 1911–1912 cooperative mission to the Belgian Congo as a representative of the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, with his white companion, Bishop Walter Russell Lambuth of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS). Throughout the book, Prof. Gilbert’s experiences and contributions are placed into the broader context of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century US history and especially into the context of African American intellectual and cultural life during that period.