When the Civil War ended and freedom came to the enslaved population of the South, it was as if prisoners on starvation rations suddenly found an abundant feast. But it wasn’t a feast served on plates. It was served in books. They were starving to read, to write and to learn of the wonders locked in books. Newly freed adults and children poured into schools which opened for Negroes during Reconstruction.
One of those starving children was John Wesley Gilbert, born to enslaved parents on a farm in Hephzibah in 1863. Freedom came when the young Gilbert was two years old. In his youth, he spent half his time working on the farm with his parents and the other half feeding his voracious mind in Augusta with various teachers — one of them Lucy Laney. Those teachers discovered uncommon curiosity, determination and intellectual gifts in the young boy.
At age 21, Gilbert learned of an interracial school being created by Black and white Methodists in Augusta. According to the history, one day in 1884 he was walking past St. John United Methodist Church on Greene Street and asked the man behind the parsonage the location of the new school. Warren Candler, soon-to-be bishop and president of Emory Grove United Methodist Church, but then pastor of St. John and one of the trustees of the new school, responded as he greased his buggy.
“Why do you want to know?” Candler asked.
“I want to go to school there. I want to be a doctor,” remarked Gilbert.
“Oh, I wouldn’t be a doctor. People can get plenty of doctors. What they need is preachers and teachers. You let doctoring alone,” Candler advised.
“If you take me out there, I’ll be a preacher.”
“Just help me get this buggy greased and I’ll do exactly that.”
The school (then in two rented rooms on Broad Street) was Paine Institute, now known as Paine College. Gilbert was its first student. In the years to come, he more than kept his promise to Candler. The president of Paine took Gilbert under his wing and tutored him to transfer in his junior year to Brown University in Rhode Island. He was one of the first 10 African-American students to attend Brown.
Gilbert excelled in Latin, Greek and classical studies. He won a scholarship to study at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, in 1890. There he received an award for excellence in Greek, pursued archeological work and wrote a thesis for which Brown University conferred to him a Master of Arts — the first advanced degree ever awarded an African American at Brown.
Gilbert had come a long way from Hephzibah, but in 1891, he returned to Augusta, and Paine’s first student and first graduate became its first Black faculty member — backed by, among others, his old buggy-greasing acquaintance, Warren Candler. The appointment of a Negro as a faculty member on equal status with what then was an all-white faculty triggered protest, and at least one resignation.
But Gilbert thrived as a professor of Greek, Latin, French, German and Hebrew. His students remembered him as exacting and wise. He expected students to work hard and he accepted no excuses for shabby performance. Beyond being a scholar, he was a mentor to his students and a leader within the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) and Augusta’s Black community.
In the Jim Crow era, he told his students, “To do any uplifting, it is necessary to get underneath.” With his former teacher Lucy Laney, he was one of the 30 signatories who chartered Augusta’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Throughout his life he metaphorically carried the weight of the 4 million freed slaves on his back, knowing he was helping create a new future.
To have been born into slavery and then accomplished so much might have satisfied another man. But Gilbert had still another challenge to meet, another chapter to write, another country to explore and other languages to master.
In 1911, he accompanied Bishop Walter Russell Lambuth of the white Methodist Episcopal Church south on a missionary trip to what was then the Belgian Congo. Gilbert, a minister of the Colored (now Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church, embodied his deep-held belief in Christian interracial cooperation.
As they steamed up the Kasai River, then trekked the jungle wilderness for more than 42 days, the Black and white missionaries relied on one another’s strengths. Lambuth relied on Gilbert’s facility with language to translate biblical texts into native languages and to communicate with the French-speaking Belgian authorities. And Gilbert had a way with children in the villages. He played with them and won their parents’ heart as well.
Lambuth, Gilbert and their porters traveled 2,100 miles into Congo before they found the “right place” to establish their mission — the village of Wembo-Nyama.
Gilbert returned to Augusta and his duties at Paine College. He died in Augusta in 1923. Some 45 years later, the institution to which he dedicated his life honored him and his Congo companion by building a chapel which can accommodate 1,200 people, naming it the Gilbert-Lambuth Memorial Chapel.
Seen in the February/ March 2025 issue of Augusta magazine.
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