Isabella Gibbons

In 1996, local historian Gayle Schulman came across a series of letters written in 1866 by Isabella Gibbons, formerly enslaved woman who taught in the Charlottesville's Freedman's School. During her research into the Gibbons family she learned that both Isabella and her husband, William Gibbons, had been owned for part of their lives by University of Virginia Professors. In 2003, Ms. Schulman began a systematic review of archives, manuscripts, census data, church membership lists, and birth and death records searching for clues to their lives as individuals and as members of a community. A portion of this research is illustrated in her manuscript titled "Slaves at the University of Virginia."

William and Isabella Gibbons were able to maintain family connections and become literate despite the constraints of slavery. Mr. Gibbons was owned by Professor Henry Howard and later worked for Professor William H. McGuffey, author of the famous McGuffey readers. Mrs. Gibbons was a domestic servant in the household of Professor Francis Smith in Pavilions V and VI. Although their marriage had no legal standing, William and Isabella Gibbons preserved their union and raised their children while living in slavery at the University of Virginia.

Legal restrictions and the strong opposition of white society severely limited access to education for Virginia’s slaves. William Gibbons learned to read by carefully observing and listening to the white students around him. Their daughter Bella recalled, “Though only little of my life was spent in slavery, yet I know enough of it to know, unless my mother taught me secretly, I could never learn to read and write...I used to go into the house to play with the little girl I belonged to and she would show me books with pictures in them, but I was dare to touch one. Then I thought it was a great blessing to be white. I don't think so now, for I can go to school every day."

After the Civil War, Isabella Gibbons became the first person of color to teach at the Jefferson School, a freedman’s school in Charlottesville and, after 1871, part of the public school system. She taught there for more than twenty years. In freedom, William Gibbons became a prominent religious leader as minister at the First Baptist Church in Charlottesville and at Zion Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., [Bio: virginia.edu]