Although he has largely receded from the public consciousness, John Mitchell Jr., the editor and publisher of the Richmond Planet, was well known to many black, and not a few white, Americans in his day. A contemporary of Booker T. Washington, Mitchell contrasted sharply with Washington in temperament. In his career as an editor, politician, and businessman, Mitchell followed the trajectory of optimism, bitter disappointment, and retrenchment that characterized African American life in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow South. Best known for his crusade against lynching in the 1880s, Mitchell was also involved in a number of civil rights crusades that seem more contemporary to the 1950s and 1960s than the turn of that century. He led a boycott against segregated streetcars in 1904 and fought residential segregation in Richmond in 1911. His political career included eight years on the Richmond city council, which ended with disenfranchisement in 1896. As Jim Crow strengthened its hold on the South, Mitchell, like many African American leaders, turned to creating strong financial institutions within the black community. He became a bank president and urged Planet readers to comport themselves as gentlemen, but a year after he ran for governor in 1921, Mitchell's fortunes suffered a drastic reversal. His bank failed, and he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years in the state penitentiary. The conviction was overturned on technicalities, but the so-called reforms that allowed state regulation of black businesses had done their worst, and Mitchell died in poverty and some disgrace. Basing her portrait on thorough primary research conducted over several decades, Ann Field Alexander brings Mitchell to life in all his complexity and contradiction, a combative, resilient figure of protest and accommodation who epitomizes the African American experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Ann Field Alexander is Professor of History at Mary Baldwin College and director of the College's regional center in Roanoke, Virginia.
Race Man provides a welcome addition to the growing body of works that take us beyond Washington and Du Bois in exploring African American responses to Jim Crow and disfranchisement . . . Specialists and generalists interested in African American history, the history of Richmond, the history of journalism, or southern biography will find this work rewarding. Like all good history, it both answers and raises questions as it expands our comprehension of the complexity and ambiguity of human existence." - History: Reviews of New Books "Alexander has resurrected Mitchell." - Virginia Magazine of History & Biography "Alexander explores ardent complexities inherent during the eras of racial uplift and white supremacy in the South. . . As a cultural historian, [she] takes into account a breadth of influences that touched the lives of Mitchell and his contemporaries. The historical tapestry in which they lived included strands of gender, economics, southern politics, an emerging black middle-class, and the social institutions of churches and fraternal orders within the black community. Finding ways to make viable contributions and walk life with dignity, around the boundaries of Jim Crow, proved to be ever-present challenges for Mitchell." - American Journalism
