The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 383, Sept. 1887, U. of Illinois Press

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SEPTEMBER · 1887 Western and Atlantic Railroad Company. He charged that on April 7 he was forcibly evicted from the first-class compartment of the railroad's Chattanooga-toAtlanta run, though he possessed a first-class ticket. The railroad argued that such a damage suit was beyond the I.C.C. jurisdiction, but the commission insisted on confronting the broader question of racial discrimination. On Dec. 3, 1887, though declining to proceed on the damages claim, the I.C.C. ruled that the railroad be notified ''to cease and desist from subjecting colored persons to undue and unreasonable prejudice and disadvantage....'' The I.C.C. based its ruling on the principle that ''There is no undue prejudice or unjust preference shown by railroad companies in separating their white and colored passengers by providing cars for each, if the cars so provided are equally safe and comfortable.'' In Alabama the state legislature reacted to the controversy by threatening to abolish Councill's school, Alabama A & M College at Huntsville, forcing Councill to resign from the presidency for a year. (U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission, Reports, May 1887 to June 1888, ~ :292, 355, 638-4~.) 3 Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, the first black city judge in Little Rock, Ark., was born in 1823. He led a varied and colorful career that included several business enterprises as well as being active in the antislavery movement and the Underground Railroad. In 1849, while on a lecture tour with Frederick Douglass, Gibbs decided to go west in search of gold in California. Later, still following the gold rush, he moved to British Columbia. Returning to the United States, Gibbs graduated from Oberlin in 1869 at the age of forty-six, and was admitted to the Arkansas bar. He was elected city judge in Little Rock in 1873. Later he was U.S. consul in Tamatave, Madagascar (~ 7-~go~. His autobiography, Shadow and Light, with an introduction by BTW, was published in 1909. 4 Probably a lodge of the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor, or I.O.T., founded in Illinois in 1855. 5 Presumably Miss Wise was appointed by the board of trustees to the Alabama A & M College faculty. 6 Peter Humphries Clark, who replaced Councill as president of Alabama A & M College during 1887, was born in Cincinnati in 18~9. He led a varied life that reflected the black man's dilemma in America. The son of a barber, Clark attended the private high school of Rev. Hiram S. Gilmore in Cincinnati from 1844 to 1848, and then was apprenticed to a liberal white artisan, Thomas Varney, to learn the stereotyping trade. In 1849, when an Ohio law allowed blacks to organize their own schools, he became a teacher, working in a barbershop between sessions. After an altercation with a white racist in his barbershop, Clark swore he would never shave another white man, or if he did, he would cut his throat. In a mood of deep discouragement in 1850 he decided to emigrate to Africa, but got only as far as New Orleans. By 18 he was an outspoken opponent of emigration. Throwing his energies into the Negro convention movement, he attended several national conventions before the Civil War and again during Reconstruction. In 1853 he lost his teaching position because the school board said he ''commented on scriptures contrary to law.'' He was a Unitarian, and the objection was that he quoted passages other than those officially prescribed. For a while he worked as a grocery clerk, but he soon regained his teaching position. In 1855 he edited an abolitionist paper, the Herald of Freedom. For many years after 1857 he was principal of Gaines High School, the segregated public secondary school of Cincinnati. Clark was a Republican until 187a, when he joined the Liberal Republican movement. In the 1880s he was a Cleveland Democrat, a ''Negrowump'' who sup383