Civic leader and businessman James C. Campbell (October 15, 1874 or 1876 - October 25, 1956) was born and raised in Charleston. He was Charleston’s first licensed Black undertaker and first Black city council member.

His father, James Alexander Campbell (1837-1928), went by the moniker “General” in private life because he claimed to have served as a brigadier general in the Union army during the Civil War; however, the highest-ranking Black officer in the war was a brevet lieutenant colonel. He could possibly be the James A. Campbell who was honorably discharged as a private from the 40^th U.S. Colored Infantry, Co. H, at the end of the war in April 1865. His military service could explain why he went by the honorific nickname “General” the rest of his life.

After the war, he and his wife, Margery Elizabeth Anderson Campbell, moved to newly established West Virginia. General Campbell found work as a barber on Dickinson and later Lee streets in Charleston, while Margery was a homemaker.

Their son James C. Campbell attended Charleston public schools, Shaw University, and Howard University Law School (graduating in 1904). James worked for several years in the Census Bureau in Washington D.C. By 1910, he had returned to Charleston, where both he and his sister Bessie were teaching in the city’s segregated Black school system.

He gave many speeches in support of Republican candidates (in the Charleston area and nationally) and wrote several political newspaper columns for The Advocate, The Charleston Daily Mail, The Washington Bee, and The Colored American. In 1911, he graduated from the Cincinnati College of Embalming. He opened his funeral home on November 12, 1912, the first such business known to have been owned, licensed, and operated by a Black person in West Virginia. For 44 years, he ran his business first on Summers Street and then at 407 Eagan Street in the city’s Triangle District.

James missed the Episcopal church services he had experienced while attending embalming school in Ohio, prompting him to establish St. James Episcopal Church in North Charleston in 1916. The founding members were a small group of Black Episcopalians in need of a church home.

On October 29, 1922, Campbell married Mattie Marie Martin, who worked alongside her husband in the funeral home. The couple had four children: James Campbell Jr., Daniel Campbell (who died a month after birth), Charlotte Elizabeth Campbell, and Marjorie Anderson Campbell.

In 1930, Campbell won a seat on Charleston’s city council representing the 8^th Ward. He held this seat for 25 years. Some of his career highlights include the renaming of a Charleston street to honor Christopher Martin, a fallen soldier from the neighborhood, and setting up the city’s Donnally Street playground. Campbell was also a founding member of the region’s first “Blacks only” golf course, The Institute Country Club, near what is now West Virginia State University.

Campbell passed away at home from congestive heart failure.