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Jonathan
Gibbs
Jonathan
Gibbs was educated in Philadelphia and then, he later related, was "refused
admittance into eighteen colleges because of my color." Eventually,
he attended Dartmouth College, and became the first African American graduate.
He later
served as a Presbyterian minister in New York and Pennsylvania.
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Sent to North
Carolina as a religious missionary after the Civil War, Gibbs opened a
school for the freedpeople, and then moved to Florida.
He was appointed
Secretary of State in 1868, and Superintendent of Education in 1873, becoming
the only African American to hold statewide office in Florida during Reconstruction.
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