MIFFLIN GIBBS

Mifflin Gibbs was an African-American entrepreneur, lawyer, and abolitionist. In 1849, Gibbs was involved enough in the abolition movement to accompany Frederick Douglass on a speaking tour in western New York. A year later, he relocated to San Francisco, where racial prejudice forced him to abandon carpentry. Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him registrar of the United States lands in 1877 for two years. A Republican, Gibbs returned to Little Rock remaining active in the business and the civil rights movement. He published his autobiography Shadow and Light in 1902, which contains an introduction written by his friend and colleague Booker T. Washington. All during his career, he advocated the creation of a strong skilled Black middle class through acquisition of property and independent control of agriculture and industry. Mifflin Gibbs died in 1915.

WILLIAM MONROE TROTTER

William Monroe Trotter was perhaps the most militant of the known civil rights activist of the 19th century. An honor student and Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, Trotter founded the Boston Guardian, a militant newspaper, in 1901, for the purpose of "propaganda against discrimination." In 1905, Trotter assisted in founding the Niagara Movement but refused to join the NAACP because he felt it to be too moderate. Because of his strident unwillingness to work with established groups, the Civil Rights Movement has been slow to recognize Trotter. But many of his methods were to be adopted in the 1950s, notably his use of nonviolent protest. In 1903, Trotter deliberately disrupted a meeting in Boston at which Booker T. Washington was to be arrested to gain publicity for militant position. He died in 1934.

DENMARK VESEY

Denmark Vesey was a self-educated black man who planned the most extensive slave revolt in U.S. history. Born a slave, Vesey was allowed to purchase his freedom with $600 he had won in a street lottery. Dissatisfied with his second-class status as a freedman and determined to help relieve the far more oppressive conditions of others he knew, Vesey planned and organized an uprising of city and plantation blacks. The plan reportedly called for the rebels to attack guardhouses and arsenals, seize their arms, kill all whites, burn and destroy the city, and free the slaves. As many as 9,000 blacks may have been involved, though some scholars dispute this figure. Warned by a house servant, white authorities on the eve of the scheduled outbreak made massive military preparations, which stopped the rebellion. During the ensuing two months, some 130 blacks were arrested. In the trials that followed, 67 were convicted of trying to raise an insurrection; of these, 35, including Vesey, were hanged, July 2, 1822 in Charleston, S.C., and 32 were condemned to exile.