The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert with John Lee

Hello and welcome to World History Encyclopedia. My name is Kelly and today I'm joined with author and scholar John Lee. John is a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and much of his work focuses on the history of ancient West Asia, especially war, society and culture in the Greek and Achaemenid world from circa 650 to 330 BCE. Today though, we're going to be chatting all about his new book, The First Black Archaeologist, A Life of John Wesley Gilbert, published by Oxford University Press. Thank you so much for joining me. Let's start off by talking about what the book is about and who this archaeologist is. Okay, first of all, it's great to be here. John Wesley Gilbert was born in rural Georgia in 1863. He was born into slavery and he rose from those beginnings to nationally known as a scholar, an educator, a community leader and a missionary. One of his great accomplishments was being the first African American scholar to go to Greece in 1890 to conduct professional archaeological work, hence the title of the book. But his life encompassed a wide range of activities that go beyond his archaeological work. Right, so in your book you talk about all of that, so both his life and also... My book is a story of a boy who grows up in poverty, facing racism, facing violence, a boy who seemed like he would have no opportunities. But thanks to dedicated teachers, both black teachers and white teachers, thanks to his own just unceasing drive to learn more and to better himself, and thanks to opportunities that presented themselves to him unexpectedly, he was able to rise from those humble beginnings really to be a national figure and to achieve in a lot of different areas. And so my book takes this story from his boyhood in Augusta, Georgia, through his early education in Georgia. It takes him to his years at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was only the third African American graduate of Brown University. And then it takes him to Athens, Greece in 1890, where he was one of the very first students of a new research institute called the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. It was the first research institution that the United States had ever planted overseas. And so in doing that, he became one of the first 50 Americans of any race or any ethnicity or any background to do professional archaeological work in Greece. And he traveled all over Greece. He wrote a thesis at the American School that would help him earn an advanced degree from Brown. So he became Brown's first African American advanced degree recipient and also one of the first African Americans anywhere in the United States to have a Classical Studies advanced degree. And then he excavated on the island of Euboea at the ancient site of Eretria, which is north of Athens. And he was part of one of the very first American excavation teams in Greece. So my book tells that story, and that's kind of the heart of the story. But I also follow his life after Greece. And in the years after he returned from Greece in 1891, he was a professor of Greek and English and German at Paine College, which is a small college in Augusta, Georgia, that had been founded to educate black students by a cooperative venture of both black and white Methodists in the South. It was unique, basically, in the South, a southern institution that was cooperatively run by an interracial board of trustees. And he devoted his life to that in many different aspects and also became a leader in his hometown of Augusta, in the church, in community and civil rights. And so he was very active in many spheres of life. And if that weren't enough, that would be an active life. In 1911, Professor Gilbert joined a white bishop, Walter Russell Lambeth, of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which was a white-dominated Methodist denomination. And together, Bishop Lambeth and Professor Gilbert embarked on an eight-month journey to what was then the Belgian Congo, in an endeavor to establish a Methodist mission there. And they succeeded in doing that. They made contact with the local leader at a place called Wemboniyama, and they laid the groundwork for a mission that exists in some form up until this day. So Professor Gilbert had a very, very eventful life. And I trace all that from his boyhood days, following all the way until his death. And I also try to place him into the broader context of his time and talk a bit about his legacy. Wow. Sounds like an amazing man. So many different things in one lifetime, which is pretty amazing. What made you want to write the story of this man? Why this book? The funny thing is, I did not start off planning to write a book about John Wesley Gilbert. As you know, my main field is ancient Greece and Achaemenid Persia, the first empire of Persia. And most of my career has been devoted to publishing on those topics. And I actually got into Professor Gilbert's life by accident, by chance. I was looking for a side project, because I was bogged down, I think it's fair to say, in another project on the ancient world. And I thought, here's someone I don't know anything about. And I just got curious. And the reason I got curious is that I mentioned the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Well, Professor Gilbert was there in 1890 to 91. I was a student there in 1996 to 1997. And I didn't know it at the time. But I sat in the same library room where he did. I visited many of the same archaeological sites that he did. In essence, I walked in his footsteps before I had even heard of him. And so when I heard, I read a short article by a classical scholar named Michelle Valerie Ronnick, who's done a lot of work with early African American scholars in classical studies. And Professor Ronnick's article kind of fascinated me. And I thought, well, I'll just, you know, I'll write a bit more about Gilbert in Greece, because it'll be quick, it'll be easy to article. And I slowly found myself being drawn in, it was a story that I knew nothing about. You know, I grew up in Asia and in Hawaii. And I knew very little about the history of the US South, I did not know that about the incredible achievements of African American education in the post Civil War period. And the more I learned, the more interested I got. And this tiny article that I thought I would write morphed into morphed into a book. So it's a great example of how sometimes the best projects come when you're not looking. Definitely. So you've not only got this personal sort of connection to this man, did you ever stumble upon his name at all in your work on Greece? So you've done or not really in your area? That's a good question. No, I hadn't. And that's part of also part of my story. So I mentioned Professor Gilbert's Congo mission. Because of that mission, he was well known and remained well known throughout the 20th century in the Methodist tradition. So his denomination, the Christian Methodist Episcopal or CME Church, which is an African American denomination, as well as the United Methodist Church, which absorbed the denomination of Bishop Lambuth. These churches, these various Methodist churches have long revered Gilbert for his role in the Congo mission. And it's part of those kind of the shared heritage of those groups. But in the archaeological side, I think archaeologists of Americans working in Greece have not thought enormously about their own history until recently. I mean, there have people have studied it, but it's been you might say, more institutional rather than personal. And so, on the one hand, Gilbert was very well known from the church perspective. But from the perspective of archaeology, and especially classical archaeology, he was he was basically forgotten until I mentioned that brief article by Professor until she began to explore the lives of these African American scholars. So was he the only one that was sort of forgotten in that archaeological history of Greece? Or was there others that now are sort of slowly gaining the limelight that they deserve? Well, there are many other African American classical scholars whose lives are now becoming better known. And if we're just talking there, of course, there are people as early as the early modern period who are working in Europe, people who are African scholars, African scholars of classics. But in terms of the post-Civil War United States, you know, there are now there's increasing attention on these figures, both men and women who many of whom pursued their careers in the segregated South, but others who stepped out onto a national stage. The most famous example is William Sanders Scarborough, who was also from Georgia. He was about a decade older than Gilbert and he became nationally known. He was perhaps the most famous black classical scholar of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But as far as Greece, Gilbert was the first African American to go to Greece to study archaeology. And into the 20th century, he's the only one of whom I am aware. And of course, many African Americans who went to Greece as travelers, as ministers, later as tourists, and there are even some expatriates that we know of as early as the 1800s. But into the 20th century, Gilbert was really the first and the only, for a long time, the only African American archaeologist. You know, classical archaeology, Greek archaeology, and Roman archaeology is kind of set off in its own world from the archaeologies of other parts of the world. And so in North American archaeology, you have African Americans participating both as trained archaeologists and as others who are not trained, but they make important discoveries and participate not only as workers, but as people who discover sites and so on. So when I call them the first black archaeologists, it's really following the lead of the Society of Black Archaeologists, who the term they used in 2012 was the first professionally trained archaeologist of African American descent. And so that's a much more precise way to say it in the terms of the Society of Black Archaeologists. And it just helps to understand that archaeology of Greece and Rome in the Near East is only one part of the many different archaeologies that exist around the world. It must have been so fascinating to read about his illustrious career, I guess, and his exciting life. What was the most interesting or fascinating or surprising thing that you learned about him and his life during your research and during your writing? No, that's a great question. So one of the interesting things is that I had to reassemble Gilbert's life basically from fragments, because he had four children, three of whom survived into adulthood, and they married, but they never had any children. He had no grandchildren. And so his papers, family letters, possessions, those were all lost. And then the archives of Payne College, the school where he taught, were tragically destroyed in a fire in 1968. So if you ask, what did I have to read? At first glance, it didn't seem like I had anything at all, because everything was destroyed or lost. And I mentioned earlier, I'm an ancient historian, so this is what we do all the time. We're used to working with fragments of the past, and maybe that explains another reason why I was drawn to the project, because it was a kind of a mode of research I was attracted to and I had some familiarity with. And amongst those fragments, I think the most exciting things are to read Gilbert's own writing, because there are fragments of his writing that survived from Greece and also from the Congo, and they survive as quotations in other sources, or a newspaper might reprint part of a letter he sent from Athens, and I was able to find those documents. And therefore, to hear Gilbert's story in his own words, and I think that reading his own words and finding them in this very roundabout way, despite the difficulties of the sources, I think that was very exciting. That is awesome, and I mean that's definitely something that anyone who's done any study of ancient history will understand, of finding bits here and bits there and then trying to reconstruct a timeline or reconstruct an event based on all of these different little bits and pieces. It's such a difficult job. Did it take you a while to get through all of the bits and pieces that you had, plus were there any sort of other secondary sources that you had available to help reconstruct his life? Yes, so I started working on this in 2015, so in book time that's not—for humanities scholars who write a book, I suppose I'm around that it's not unusual to spend the better part of a decade. Actually, one thing that's important to say is that I had good timing. So I visited Georgia, I visited Rhode Island, I visited South Carolina and North Carolina, I went to Greece. There were places where I was able to find documents that talked about Professor Gilbert that came from the network of scholars around him. And so I was able to find that kind of evidence, and I was able to do all of that by the end of 2019. And I don't need to tell you that if I had done it times later, the book would not be done. And so, you know, Gilbert would have probably said it was providential that that happened. And then by the time I was working on the Congo and I needed material from archives in the southern states of the United States, many of those archives were open again—Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia—so that at the ending part I was able to order documents from archives. So, you know, a lot of it has to do with timing. In this better part of a decade, if I had been off by a few months, I would still be struggling. And I say that partly because I know that there are other scholars out there who have those challenges, and I'm deeply sympathetic because I just happen to be—my timing happened to be good, and I was able to finish the book in time. Something that should have been fairly routine—being able to pop over to another country and, you know, access this stuff—suddenly became so difficult for so many people. What do you think is one thing that everybody should know about the life of John Leslie Gilbert, or your book in general? My book in general? Boy, that's just one thing. Or a couple of things that you think is an important thing to take away or know about. So first, about Professor Gilbert as a person, he was an incredible linguist. He mastered classical Greek and classical Latin, which was the standard for education in those days, but he spoke French very well, he spoke modern Greek very well, he spoke German decently well, and he spoke it well enough to teach it at his school. He studied Hebrew, biblical Hebrew, as part of his work. And then when he went to Africa, he mastered conversational basics of two African languages. The languages Xoluba and Ototela, and these are languages that are spoken in what is today the Congo. And those languages he studied later on in his life. So the first thing is, here's someone who was intellectually gifted, and he just had the ability to master these languages. And then also to teach them, which is another part of it. And to balance it off for Gilbert as a person, he was good with children. And this is a kind of a, you know, like it's a book about a scholar. But one of the striking things about him is that he was good with children, and he knew how to interact with kids, and kids loved him, and they would come up to him and talk to him. And this comes out in the Congo mission, where his white partner, Bishop Lambeth, mentions in his diary, all the children love Gilbert, they crowd around him at every stop. And even the chief of the village will let his son sit on Gilbert's knee. And so that's another part of his life that, you know, I think is equally important in being a father, in a way. It gives you equally important insight into his character, that he had the kind of kindness and patience needed to be good with kids, as well as being intellectually brilliant, and a gifted teacher. It's the kind of information you wouldn't normally get to know about a person from history. Like, it's a very personal thing that normally, you know, if you get any sort of sources about a person, you tend to get how they are with their family or their kids. That's a deeply intimate thing to know about him, which is lovely. Yes, yeah, yeah, no, it is. You know, I think this is also I would, I mentioned his children, you know, his third daughter died at age 18, very suddenly, probably of an infection or appendicitis, just when she was about to go to go to college. And all of his children accomplished things in their own spheres. But she seems to have been the one who's kind of destined for a very, very bright future. And then her life was very tragically cut short. So, you know, in his own life, we also had Yeah, he also confront that kind of personal tragedy. And I mentioned this to say, you know, these are ways of saying that this is someone who was a complex and multifaceted person, who's not just, you know, abstract figure, we're going to put in a pedestal and say, look, but but I try in my book really to bring out the different facets of his of his life. And as much as I can from the fragmentary sources to to reveal, you know, how people saw him as a, as a person. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a great story. So now if you had if I if you were going to ask me what should people know about Professor Gilbert in a wider context, I would say that Gilbert is in one respect, not unusual. And that is because he is part of I think, one of the greatest achievements in the history of the United States. And that's the rising up of African Americans during and after the Civil War, coming to freedom and then coming to education. And Gilbert was not unusual in in pursuing learning with this with this deep, deep, deep enthusiasm. We have many, many sources from the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s that talk about young people, old people, men, women, boys, girls, all striving to learn. And if you look at the speed with which the the rate of black illiteracy declined in the United States in the 19th century, basically around 1870, I may get the figures wrong, but it was on par with the national or the international average. So 80% of African Americans or more were illiterate. And that had fallen off in a generation to under 20%. And I think this is just amazing. And it's a story that anybody who knows the history of HBCUs or historically black colleges and universities is familiar with. But it's a story that in our wider, wider conversations in the United States is maybe not as well known. And it's just it's so inspiring. It's so remarkable. It is so humbling to see people who are who are striving for education, and they did so in the face of, you know, racism, violence. At the end of the 1800s, we're talking about the imposition of the Jim Crow, apartheid regime in the United States. This is a Professor Gilbert's life is a part of this big mosaic of extraordinary achievement that I think that people should know more. Brilliant. And obviously now people can know a lot more about by picking up your book and reading all about his life and his achievements. Did you have any involvement with the community in Augusta, Georgia while researching and working on this book? Yeah, that's a great question. I did. I, you know, I mentioned that I had been a student in Greece. And so I'd been to Greece before many times. And I went again to Greece in the course of my research, but I had never been to Augusta, Georgia. I mean, aside from maybe a brief visit to Atlanta, I really had not had much experience in Georgia at all. So I made several trips there. And I received invaluable mentorship and guidance and help from many people in the community. And a couple that I would mention by name is Dr. Mallory Millinder, who taught French and journalism at Paine College for many years, and he is the college's historian. So we first met actually online. We were introduced by a friend of Dr. Millinder's, Reverend Ashley Calhoun, whose father had been the president of Paine College in the 1950s and 1970s. So when I went to Augusta, Dr. Millinder took me everywhere, helped me meet people, showed me the important places that were related to Gilbert's life. And he introduced me to many others in the Augusta community, people who worked for historic preservation groups, people who were involved with the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, Historic Augusta, many other organizations, and of course, to Paine College, where Dr. Millinder was an alumnus himself. So this is a book that came out of my interactions with this local community. And I'd like to say whenever I give a talk that this is the story of Paine College. It's the story of the people of Augusta, and especially of its African American community. And I'm really just the messenger. It was given to me to tell this story and to share it with a broader world. But I got help from so many people in Augusta, and I could go on and name maybe the one other person I would mention is Ms. Alana Lewis, who's the archivist at Paine College. And I mentioned that Paine's archives had been destroyed, but bits and pieces survived, and more things kept coming. And Ms. Lewis played a very, very crucial role in organizing and preserving and putting together this material so that it was available for a researcher like me to come and to visit. And she and her staff, and in fact, everybody that I interacted with in Augusta, were always so welcoming and helpful and friendly. Everything from touring the historic neighborhoods of the city, to being on campus, to meeting people from various churches. One of the very special things about this book was to interact in that way. Because if you do ancient history, you have people you're studying who have been dead for a long, long time. And it was very, very meaningful to make a difference by contributing to this community's history. Amazing. That's just amazing, and that definitely makes me think of the sort of archaeology that archaeologists in Australia are now working towards, and it's very community-based archaeology, and it's working with the community to learn about their history. So that's amazing that you could go and talk to these people. You mentioned the way that archaeology is moving in Australia now. Could I add something about the future, in the sense that I've written a book about a pioneering figure about a century ago, and it's important that we acknowledge his legacy and his accomplishments, along with many other people who have been sort of hidden figures. But I think it's also, I hope that this will prompt people to think about, in our own day, with students who may be young and may face challenges to getting an education, may not have opportunities, may not be drawn to one scholarly field or another. I hope that my book also makes everyone who reads it think about, how can I create opportunities for others? And if there are scholars, how can we make it so that we have as broad a range of perspectives and people that come into our fields? So academic books, they don't tend to sell a lot of books, but if reading about this story from the past prompts someone to think about what can be done for today and for the future, then I think that would be another way to honour Professor Gilbert's legacy. I think about the struggles that he faced and the way he persevered, and I think that we can draw inspiration from that and not just be content to go like, oh that was a great story from the past, but how can we bring this kind of spirit into our present? So everyone who's interested in reading the book, you can find a link to purchase it down below, and thank you so much for joining World History Encyclopedia today. Thank you so much. This video was brought to you by World History Encyclopedia. For more great articles and interactive content, head to our website via the link below. 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