John Wesley Gilbert (July 6, 1863[1] – November 18, 1923) was an American archaeologist, educator, and Methodist missionary to the Congo.

"[5] After finishing public school, Gilbert enrolled in the Augusta Institute (later the Atlanta Baptist Seminary, a predecessor of Morehouse College).

There, he was among the first ten black students to attend the school and among the forty African-Americans to graduate from any northern university between 1885 and 1889.

He then moved back to Georgia, where in 1889 he married Osceola Pleasant, a graduate of Fisk University and the Paine Institute.

In 1891, Gilbert returned to Augusta, Georgia and began to teach Greek, French, German, Latin, and Hebrew at his former school, Paine College.

"[4] He was remembered at Paine most of all as "an exacting teacher" who "would not tolerate weak excuses," since "he knew from personal experience that only diligence and plain hard work produced scholars.

[1] In 1911 and 1912, Gilbert undertook a mission to the Belgian Congo with Walter Russell Lambuth, a (white) bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

"[12] Similarly, Lambuth argued that southern Methodists were suited to successfully evangelize Africa: "We are born and brought up with black men.

"[13] Lambuth and Gilbert cooperated well; Lambuth praised Gilbert's language skills, writing that his translations were "so well done that the Colonial Minister, upon my subsequent visit to Brussels, inquired who wrote the letters, and remarked that they were the most correct and elegantly expressed among those received at his office from one who was not a native of either France or Belgium.

[15] This school would later educate Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and an icon of anticolonialism and pan-Africanism.

[14] In its current form as the Patrice-Emery-Lumumba University of Wembo-Nyama, this school is supported by American Methodists to this day.

"[14] But Gilbert also had an immense positive influence as an educator and a role model, including on another prominent African American from Augusta, John Hope, the first black president of Morehouse College and one of the founding members of the Niagara Movement.

[19] Gilbert's alma mater, Paine College, dedicated a chapel in honor of him and Bishop Lambuth in 1968.

[21] In 2020, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens named the newly renovated Student Center after Gilbert.