Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was born on 17 April 1823 in Philadelphia, the eldest of four children of Jonathan Gibbs, a Methodist minister who died when Mifflin was a child, and Maria Gibbs, who worked as a laundress. He learned carpentry through an apprenticeship, read widely and attended debates at the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons.
After the 1849 gold rush he went to California, where he became a successful retail merchant and a leader of San Francisco's Black community and a founder of the first Black newspaper west of the Mississippi River. As racism and discrimination grew in California, he led a mass migration in 1858: about 800 Black San Franciscans left for Vancouver Island, at the invitation of Governor James Douglas, who promised the freedom they had never known. Before he left an English abolitionist, Julia Griffith, told him to go do some great thing.
In Victoria Gibbs prospered as a merchant, contractor and property developer, and became the recognised leader of the Black community. He helped organise the colony's first militia unit, an all-Black corps known as the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps or African Rifles. In developing a coal mine in the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1869 to 1870 he built British Columbia's first railroad.
In November 1866 Gibbs was elected to the Victoria City Council for the James Bay district, becoming the first Black person elected to public office in British Columbia. Sources give 16 or 19 November for the election. He was re-elected in 1868, and in the same year represented Salt Spring Island at the Yale Convention, an important step in British Columbia's path to joining Canada.
Gibbs returned to the United States in 1870 and settled in Little Rock, Arkansas. He studied law, passed the bar and in 1873 became the first elected Black municipal judge in the United States. He later served as US consul to Madagascar, helped found a Black-owned bank and published his autobiography, Shadow and Light, in 1902. He died in Little Rock on 11 July 1915, aged 92, and Victoria proclaimed 19 November Mifflin Wistar Gibbs Day in 2016.
- First Black person elected to public office in British Columbia, 1866
- Led the 1858 migration of about 800 Black Californians to Vancouver Island
- Built British Columbia's first railroad at a coal mine in the Queen Charlotte Islands
- First elected Black municipal judge in the United States, 1873
- Author of the autobiography Shadow and Light, 1902
- Leaving can be leadership. Gibbs organised a mass migration toward better protection under the British flag.
- Public service can cross borders. He held office in Canada and the United States and fought for equality in both.