MIAMI — Mourners met for a service in honor of activist Thelma Gibson on Wednesday morning at the Christ Episcopal Church in Miami’s Coconut Grove.
The nurse, who served as interim Miami commissioner and University of Miami emeritus trustee, and founded the Women’s Chamber of Commerce of Dade, died on Feb. 11. She was 99.
“She believed that the work that she did spoke for her,“ Rev. Jonathan Archer said during the ceremony.
Gibson was born on Dec. 17, 1926, into a Bahamian-American pioneer family in Miami’s Coconut Grove.
“I was delivered by midwife ... My grandpa was the second person of color to buy a house here. I think he paid $25 for those two lots ... There were lots of mango trees,” Gibson told the Heart of the Grove in 2021.
As a child of the Great Depression, she was among 14 siblings growing up in the Grove’s “Colored Town.” Their two-bedroom home, at 3382 Charles Ave., did not have electric or water services.
“Charles Avenue was the most popular street,” Gibson told Vizcaya’s Black Grove podcast, also adding that Grand Avenue was home to “a lot of the Blacks who had their own businesses.”
Gibson, who was passionate about Black history, often talked about her experiences with racism and segregation.
“I couldn’t try on a Girl Scout uniform because of the color of my skin, and I couldn’t try on a hat because they said our hair was too greasy,” Gibson said during her 2012 TEDx talk.
After graduating from George Washington Carver High School in 1944, she attended Saint Agnes School of Nursing at Saint Augustine’s College through the World War II–era Cadet Nurse Corps program.
Gibson wed Rev. Canon Theodore Roosevelt Gibson in 1945 and became a registered nurse in 1947. She worked in Jackson Memorial Hospital’s “Colored Wards” even though she had operating room training.
Gibson attended Florida A&M University, Catholic University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Teachers College at Columbia University.
“I couldn’t go to the University of Miami on campus,” Gibson said during her 2012 TEDx talk about getting an education off-campus during segregation.
Gibson earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing education from the University of Miami in 1959. She worked at the E.J. Hall Clinic, the Gallinger Memorial Hospital, the Dade County Health Department, and the Riverside Hospital for teenage drug addicts.
Gibson also served as a nursing supervisor and as a part-time social worker at Mount Sinai Hospital from 1967 to 1980.
“Whatever I did in life, I did it because God gave me the ability, the strength, and the courage,” Gibson wrote in “Forbearance,” her autobiography published in 2000.
Gibson served as president of the Theodore Roosevelt Gibson Memorial Fund in memory of her husband, a civil rights activist and former Miami commissioner who died of cancer in 1982. She was a Life Member of the NAACP and served on the board for the Coconut Grove Cares Mental Health Association.
In 2000, the Thelma Gibson Health Initiative, a Miami-based nonprofit organization, started serving low-income neighborhoods. The Theodore R. and Thelma A. Gibson Charter School serves kids in Miami’s Overtown.
“She paved the path for so many of us now building companies, organizations, and brands in Miami,” Merline Barton, president and founder of TGHI, told The Miami Times last year.
Gibson’s altruism earned her a long list of awards, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Drum Major for Justice Award, the Jewish Home and Hospital Women’s Auxiliary Sacred Heart Award, and the Jackson Memorial Hospital Image Committee Award.
“The fact that God let me live this long is all that I’m really thankful for, and the fact that I’ve been able to do whatever I could to help make change take place,” Gibson told The Miami Herald in December. “But recognition is not something I’m looking for.”
Watch the service
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