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Parks Canada honours black entrepreneur who was one of B.C.'s founders

Mifflin Gibbs attended the Yale Convention to debate whether B.C. should become Canada's sixth province
Mifflin Gibbs
On Sunday, Feb. 19 at 2 p.m. at Victoria's Cook Street Activity Centre, Parks Canada will unveil a plaque to commemorate Mifflin Gibbs as a person of national historic significance.

Mifflin Gibbs wasn’t a father of Confederation. But he was one of its relatives.

More telling, Gibbs was probably the only black man to be involved in British Columbia’s debate about whether to join the rest of Canada.

In 1868, Gibbs was the Salt Spring Island delegate to the Yale Convention to discuss whether B.C. should be Canada’s sixth province, which happened three years later.

Gibbs took the yea side. Parks Canada, which is unveiling a plaque in his honour on Sunday, says that his point of view wasn’t very popular; in those days, since most of his fellow Vancouver Island residents wanted to join the United States.

Gibbs was born in 1823 in Philadelphia. He started working when he was eight and moved to California to take advantage of business opportunities during the Gold Rush, says Vancouver resident Sherry Edmunds-Flett, who has written Gibbs’ biography for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

“He was quite the entrepreneur who always gave back to the wider community,” says Edmunds-Flett, who’s doing a PhD on the history of black women in B.C. from 1858 to 1938.

After California took away many rights for African-Americans, James Douglas, the mixed-race governor of Vancouver Island, invited 800 African-Americans to join him on the island, where he was in charge of the Hudson Bay Company.

“[Gibbs] came to Victoria with ‘a large invoice of miners’ outfits, consisting of flour, bacon, blankets, picks, shovels, etc.,’ which he sold immediately,” Edmunds writes in her online biography. “The day after his arrival he bought a one-storey house for $3,000, and it became the site for a mercantile business, reportedly the first outside the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

Later Gibbs became the first black politician in B.C. when he elected for two terms on Victoria city council. Eventually he moved back to the States where, among other things, he founded a bank for African-Americans and was asked to be the American consul of Madagascar. He died in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1915.

On Sunday, Feb. 19 at 2 p.m. at Victoria's Cook Street Activity Centre, Parks Canada will unveil a plaque to commemorate Mifflin Gibbs as a person of national historic significance. The unveiling will be part of B.C. Black Heritage and History Day celebrations with speakers, exhibits and live music.

You can read more about Mifflin Gibbs on the BC Black History Awareness Society website.