April 17, 1823

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, a Little Rock (Pulaski County) businessman, politician, and the first elected African-American municipal judge in the United States, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the eldest of four children. In California, Gibbs founded the first black newspaper west of the Mississippi River, The Mirror of the Times (1855). He settled in Little Rock in 1871. Gibbs died in 1915 at his home in Little Rock; he is buried in the Fraternal Cemetery on Barber Street. A school in Little Rock, which was once a school for African Americans and later an elementary school, then the first international studies/foreign languages magnet school in Arkansas, is named for Gibbs.

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