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Born into slavery in rural Georgia, John Wesley Gilbert rose to national prominence as a scholar, teacher, community leader, and missionary. The family of his mother, Sarah (ca. 1843-1911) can be traced in slaveowners’ documents as far back as the 1820s. His father's identity is unknown. Gilbert grew up in Augusta, Georgia, “nursed in the arms of poverty,” as he later recalled. His mother was a domestic servant and Gilbert did hard farm labor to earn money. Sarah was married from 1873 to 1875, but her husband died.

Young Gilbert received his early education in Augusta’s segregated public schools. There he encountered remarkable teachers, amongst them Lucy Craft Laney, Georgia’s most famous black woman educator. In the late 1870s, Gilbert served as a teacher’s assistant. Because Georgia had no public high schools for black students, he attended the Augusta Institute, a Baptist-sponsored academy for black ministers and teachers. Gilbert followed the school when it moved to become Atlanta Baptist Seminary (the predecessor of Morehouse College), but lack of money forced him to return to Augusta.

After several years working as a teacher, Gilbert enrolled as the first student of Augusta’s Paine Institute, a cooperative venture of the white Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) and the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church (today Christian Methodist Episcopal Church). His mentor at Paine, MECS minister George Williams Walker, tutored Gilbert in Greek and helped him win admission to Brown University.  At Brown, Gilbert studied with Albert Harkness, one of the foremost American classicists of the day. Gilbert was Brown’s third black graduate and one of only about forty African Americans to graduate from a northern college or university between 1885 and 1889.

In a move still judged “almost unbelievable” in the 1930s, Paine Institute’s biracial board of trustees hired Gilbert in 1888 as the school’s first black professor over the objections of a white instructor.  Gilbert was associated with Paine until the end of his life.  He earned a reputation as “a linguist of pure distinction,” teaching French, German, Hebrew, Latin, and above all, Greek. Among his students at Paine were future NAACP leader Channing Tobias and John Hope, the first black president of Morehouse College and Atlanta University.

Gilbert was one of the first fifty scholars to attend the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He was the American School’s first African American student. During his year in Greece, Gilbert traveled extensively, wrote a thesis on the demes of Athens, and took part in archaeological fieldwork at ancient Eretria including the excavation of the so-called “tomb of Aristotle.”  With his fellow student John Pickard, Gilbert conducted a topographical survey of Eretria that remains valuable today.  Gilbert’s work in Greece won him an A.M. degree from Brown—the first advanced degree that school awarded to an African American.

Gilbert was elected to membership in the American Philological Association in 1897 and remained a member until 1907.  He studied at Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, became a CME minister, and returned in to Europe in 1901 to attend an ecumenical Methodist conference in London. He also became increasingly active as an advocate for civil rights, black economic advancement, and interracial cooperation in Augusta and beyond.

In 1911-1912, Gilbert and MECS minister Walter Russell Lambuth undertook an arduous mission to establish a Methodist presence in the Belgian Congo. They traveled over a thousand miles by river and on foot. During the mission, Gilbert translated portions of the New Testament from Greek into the Bantu language Otetela.

Following a brief stint as president of Miles Memorial College, Gilbert served as dean of theology for several years at Paine. During the First World War, he was active in charitable and patriotic efforts. He was asked to teach French to American troops in France but was unable to accept the invitation.

Gilbert and his wife Osceola Pleasant (ca. 1862-1922) may have met in childhood. Osceola Pleasant studied at Fisk University and Paine Institute. She worked as a teacher in Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia.  The couple had four children, but no grandchildren. Their oldest daughter became a teacher. By 1921, John Wesley Gilbert was gravely ill. He died in Augusta and is buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery there.