During her memorial, Coconut Grove icon Thelma Gibson’s words led the service
Twenty-six years before her death, Thelma Gibson laid out the plans for her funeral very simply: “I don’t want anyone to talk about my life’s accomplishments or failures. I want a simple mass of the resurrection with no sermon or eulogy,” she wrote in her autobiography “Forbearance, Thelma Vernell Anderson Gibson: Life Story of a Coconut Grove Native.”
Instead, the words written in her autobiography served as the guide for the two-hour service filled with hymns and scriptures, as Christ Episcopal Church rector Father Jonathan Archer read a passage from the book which was published in 2000 during her memorial on Friday.
“She believed in receiving her roses when she could see them and smell them,” Archer told the more than 250 people who gathered in the historic Coconut Grove church to pay their respects to Gibson. “The work that she did spoke for her.”
The native Miamian who championed her Coconut Grove community and was a pioneer in the health care field, acknowledged her request may seem odd, but wrote she had a reason.
“Whatever I did in life, I did it because God gave me the ability, the strength and the courage,” Gibson wrote and Archer read. “Some things I did well, and others not so well, but whatever I did well, I tried to do it for others. I have now, and I had then, the satisfaction of knowing that I was able to help somebody as I passed this way. So it’s not necessary to talk about what I did.”
Loved ones didn’t speak during the services but told the Miami Herald how much their matriarch meant to them. One of Gibson’s nieces, Todra Anderson-Rhodes said her aunt “was the definition of love.”
“She loved us so much, individually and collectively, but it’s the individual love that she had for each of us that bonded us and knit us closer together,” she told the Herald following the service. “If I had to define love, she would be right up there. We never had to feel like we were second best, because she made us feel so special.”
Grandson Charles Gibson said Gibson was like a second mother to him and that he’ll miss her counsel the most. “She taught me how to love, and I think that’s really important, and she taught me how to speak up when she thought what she saw was wrong,” he said, adding he admired her poise and quick-wittedness
‘She achieved a lot’
Born Thelma Vernell Anderson on Dec. 17, 1926, Gibson grew up in a segregated Coconut Grove neighborhood, once known as Colored Town. The sixth of 14 children to Sweetlon and Thomas Anderson.
A graduate of George Washington Carver High School (now a middle school), Gibson would go on to attend St. Agnes Nursing School in Raleigh, North Carolina, a nursing school for Black people. She attended college for free through the Cadet Corp program, created by the United States government to teach and train nurses as a result of a nursing shortage during World War II.
Gibson would return home after graduation and become one of the first Black nurses at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Her 33-year nursing career, however, has taken her to Washington, D.C. and New York. She also made history in 1964, when she became the first Black Assistant Supervisor of Nursing in the Dade County Health Department.
Outside of nursing, Gibson spent her life advocating for Coconut Grove residents during a time of rapid gentrification, developing nonprofits that advocate for businesswomen and the health and wellness of communities. She also spearheaded efforts for the neighborhood to be called Little Bahamas.
Anderson-Rhodes said Gibson’s love and what she’d endured in the medical profession helped her thrive in her own medical career. “She would always encourage me, particularly as a Black woman, no to let anybody tell you what you can’t do, you do what you can do to the best of your ability,” Anderson-Rhodes said. “Do that with excellence, and the rest will govern itself.”
Gibson also fought for the rights of Black people alongside her husband, late pastor and activist Theodore Gibson, a pioneer of desegregation who led the effort to integrate then-Dade County Public Schools. The two married in 1967 and were together for 15 years before his death in 1982.
A year later, Gibson created the Theodore Gibson Memorial Fund in his honor. She would also go on to found the Women’s Chamber of Commerce of Miami-Dade County and the Thelma Gibson Health Initiative.
Gibson’s niece Kaye Woodard said her aunt’s final words in her autobiography spoke to her ability to reinvent herself and achieve what she desired. “She achieved a lot,” Woodard said. “Everything she put her mind to, she was able to accomplish.”
Anderson-Rhodes said her aunt’s sense of humor was one of her greatest attributes. It was on full display when Archer read an excerpt from Gibson’s book where she predicted her longevity, and joked about it: “I’ve had a good ride. I love you, one and all, and I hope to see you all in the morning in our great bye and bye,” she wrote before adding, “I write this even though I expect to be around a while longer.”
Gibson got a good chuckle from the audience one last time. She will be buried at Miami City Cemetery with her husband.
