Richard Gustavus Forrester (13 February 1823–2 July 1891), member of the Richmond City Council, was born in Richmond and was the son of Gustavus Adolphus Myers, a white attorney, and Nelly Forrester, a free Black woman who worked in the Myers household. His father descended from the Myers and Hays families, two of the oldest Jewish families in New England, some of whom relocated to Richmond after the American Revolution. Unable to take his father's family name, he was given his mother's last name and raised in the home of Gustavus Myers's aunts, Slowey Hays and Catharine Hays. The Hays sisters were both devout Sephardic Jews and, unlike many of their Richmond neighbors, held strong abolitionist views. Concerned about Virginia's 1806 expulsion law that required freed enslaved persons to leave the state within a year, they worked with Myers to protect young Forrester by referring to him in their wills as if he was an enslaved person. When Slowey Hays died in 1836, in addition to leaving her entire estate to her sister, her will outlined the conditions under which Forrester could be freed. According to family tradition, about that time he was sent to Canada and Boston to be educated.

About 1840 Forrester married his second cousin Narcissa Wilson, a free woman of color of mixed parentage. They had at least eleven sons and nine daughters, not all of whom lived to adulthood. They returned to live in Richmond with Catharine Hays, who identified them as her enslaved servants to shield them from any legal jeopardy. At her death in 1854 she, like her sister, included provisions for freeing Forrester, but he continued to live as if enslaved. Forrester and his family moved in with Hays's white housekeeper Excy Gill, who died unexpectedly the following year. Gill's will emancipated Forrester's children (upon reaching the age of twenty-one), and she left them her home. Publicly identified as enslaved, however, Forrester and his family could not inherit the property, and so Catharine Hays's nieces—who became the ostensible owners of the Forrester family—signed a document on 22 June 1855, stating that "Our slaves Richard and Narcissa are permitted to remain and reside in the Tenement on College Street lately occupied by Miss Excy Gill."

In the 1860 federal manuscript census, Forrester was living as a free man and indicated his occupation as gardener. Apparently prospering during the years when Richmond was the capital of the Confederate States of America, in 1864 he posted a newspaper notice offering a reward of $100 for a missing pregnant hog. He and his family were not immune to any of the dangers facing Black Virginians, especially in wartime Richmond. From the porch of his home on the corner of College and Marshall Streets, Forrester could hear the public whippings administered at the nearby city jail. In her account of visiting the family shortly after the war, abolitionist Julia Wilbur reported that on "the Saturday before the surrender screams were heard there for 2 hrs." Family tradition describes how Forrester's son Richard Gill Forester put himself and the family in danger on 17 April 1861, when he recovered the American flag that had been pulled down from the Capitol. When Confederate soldiers fled Richmond on 3 April 1865, he raced back to restore that same flag over the Capitol.

After the war, Forrester was a successful carpenter and dairyman and was also well-known in the city for breeding chickens, about 150 of which were stolen in February 1869. A strong proponent of education, he was part of a group of men who chartered the Richmond Educational Association in July 1867 to establish a school to train African American teachers. Forrester helped establish the first Black Masonic lodge in Richmond about the same time and held the office of tiler (doorkeeper). His selection in 1870 as Grand Marshal of Richmond's parade celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment reflected his standing across the Black community. The following year white Democrats created Jackson Ward, which was gerrymandered to include most of the city's African American population and neutralize the Black vote. In May 1871 Jackson Ward voters elected Forrester and Alpheus Roper to Richmond's common council, making them the first two of the thirty-three African Americans elected to the council during the subsequent twenty-five years.

Forrester served on the common council until 1874, when he was elected to the board of aldermen. In 1880 he was again elected to the common council but lost his seat in 1882 after serving eleven years in office. Local African American officeholders struggled to effect any change in white segregationist policies as Black representation from Jackson Ward constituted a small proportion of the seats on the city council. Forrester and his fellow councilmen did achieve some improvements for the Black community, such as new schools, fuel distribution during the winter, better lighting and streets for Jackson Ward, and they worked to end the practice of grave robbing in Black cemeteries.

In March 1883 the Readjuster coalition, which had transformed state politics following its sweeping victories two years prior, appointed Forrester and Robert Austin Paul to fill unexpired terms on the Richmond City School Board. The first Black members of the school board, they found themselves in the eye of intense public outcry from white residents who shared their "unspeakable outrage of having negroes appointed to visit white schools." Despite assurances that Black trustees would only visit African American schools, the Richmond Daily Dispatch was adamant that "we want white officials without exception—especially school trustees. This last admits of no compromise." Forrester was assigned to the finance and to the buildings and furniture committees. He and Paul worked successfully with the Readjusters to increase the number of Black schools and the number of African American teachers. While Forrester's term ended in August 1883, the Democratic Party used the threat of further appointments of Black school trustees as part of a larger statewide campaign of racial hysteria to sweep the Readjusters out of power in November.

Forrester's wife died on 16 February 1883, and on 21 June 1888 he married Betsy N. Cephas. Richard Gustavus Forrester died at his Richmond home on 2 July 1891, and he was buried next to his first wife in Methodist Cemetery, later part of Richmond's Barton Heights cemeteries. As a business and political leader, Forrester symbolized the self-confidence and racial consciousness of Richmond's Black community in spite of great oppression. Among his lasting legacies, he instilled a tradition of service to community among his descendants and sought to provide a better future for his dozens of grandchildren by establishing bank accounts for each of them. He was also an early investor in the Richmond council of the Independent Order of Saint Luke, an African American benevolent organization that assisted the sick, poor, and elderly and that provided death benefits to members. These investments helped future generations become prominent doctors, lawyers, politicians, and entrepreneurs. His son, William M. T. Forrester, directed the organization and hired a young Maggie Lena Mitchell Walker, who eventually established Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank, becoming the first Black woman in the country to be president of a bank.

Sources Consulted:
Dates of birth and death on gravestone, Barton Heights cemeteries; family history documented by descendant Keith Stokes in "Eyes of Glory: An American Story of Faith, Family and Freedom" and 1696 Heritage Group blog; Theresa M. Guzman-Stokes, "A Flag & a Family: Richard Gill Forrester, 1847–1906," Virginia Cavalcade 47 (spring 1998): 52–63 (portrait on 55); Caroline Myers Cohen, Records of the Myers, Hays and Mordecai Families, from 1707 to 1913 (1913), 17; first quotation in 22 June 1855 statement signed by Catharine H. Myers, Harriet Myers, and Julia Myers in Myers Family Papers, 1763–1923, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, Va.; Richmond City Hustings Will Book 7:297–298 (Slowey Hays will) and 17:31–32 (Excy Gill will); Catharine Hays will in Richmond City Circuit Court Will Book 1, 71–74; second quotation in Diary of Julia Wilbur (1865), transcription (2015), 57, originals at Haverford College Library, Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford, Penn.; second marriage in Marriage Register (1888), Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 3 July 1867, 19 July 1867, 5 Feb. 1869, 26 May 1871, 29 May 1874, 31 May 1880, 27 May 1882, 12 May 1883, 25 May 1883, 26 May 1883; (third and fourth quotations); Richmond Times Dispatch, 7 Sept. 1983, 25 Feb. 2002; death certificate in Richmond City Department of Health Death Certificates, Library of Virginia; death notices in Richmond State, 2 July 1891, Richmond Times, 2 July 1891, and Richmond Dispatch, 3 July 1891; funeral account in Richmond Planet, 11 July 1891.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Lee Ann Timreck.

How to cite this page:
Lee Ann Timreck, "Richard Gustavus Forrester (1823–1891)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Forrester_Richard_Gustavus, accessed [today's date]).

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