John Wesley Gilbert (1863-1923)

When you consider how his life began, as John Lee does in forensic detail in The First Black Archaeologist, it is almost beyond belief that John Wesley Gilbert became the urbane, highly educated man we see in this photograph. John Wesley Gilbert, archaeologist and ‘the best foreign language department in the Southeast’, photographed c.1888. Image: Courtesy of Brown University Digital Repository / Dreamstime Gilbert was born into slavery in 1863 while the American Civil War still raged over whether people like him should be freed. He never knew his father, and his philandering stepfather died only two years after marrying Sarah, Gilbert’s mother, in 1873 – a year of economic cri