Charlene Mitchell - Activism

Activism

At the conference on Black Women And The Radical Tradition held "in tribute to Charlene Mitchell" at Brooklyn College Graduate Center in 2009, Genna Rae McNeil recounted the origins of Mitchell's involvement in political activism. "I probably have been trying to be an organizer most of my life," Mitchell observed to McNeil in 1995. McNeil went on to relate that:

...at age 7 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Charlene's mother's illness necessitated that Charlene take several busses for one of the scariest trips on which she had ever been thus far in her life. She was on her way to the Federal jail to visit her labor-activist father. After a long ride with several transfers, she arrived so late at the Federal jail that the guards deemed it too late for her to really have any kind of visit. Technically, at the time of her arrival, visiting hours were not over, and Charlene at age 7 argued the point, protesting the guards' decision which, if implemented, would have prevented her from visiting her father and delivering a basket of items her mother had entrusted to her for him. Through what she remembers and describes as "hollering and demanding", she managed to persuade the armed guard to let her go up in the jail elevator at the very end of visiting hours then, and after she "hollered" some more, she persuaded the guard that visiting her father with the glass between them was completely unacceptable, and made it impossible for her to deliver the basket. The guards held the basket and let her go into the room where there were table visits permitted providing visitors remained on their side of the table. As soon as Charlene's father came out and sat down, Charlene jumped around the table and sat on his lap. The guards threw up their hands, but she was not finished yet. She kept talking to them about the basket, telling the guards they could not go away with her father's basket, until they finally agreed that her father could see the basket before they took it back for inspection. In their very next conversation Charlene's mother and father had, Charlene's father told her mother 'never let Charlene come again'. It was too hard on him and the jailers would never get over it.

Charlene Mitchell's early civil rights activism included organizing, in 1943 at the age of 13, both black and white teenagers in pickets and other actions at the Windsor Theatre in Chicago, which segregated black customers in the balcony, and also at a nearby segregated bowling alley. The lack of success of picketing and leafletting led the young Charlene to organize another action for her group of activists, who took the name American Youth for Democracy. They held a sit-in at the Windsor, with white members going up to the "colored only" balcony while black members took their seats in the auditorium's "whites only" section below.

So began a long career of unrelenting activism and persistence, perhaps most famously illustrated in the success of the campaign to free Angela Davis, which she led alongside Kendra Alexander and Franklin Alexander.

Speaking at the same event as McNeil, Davis described the effort to free her, spearheaded by Mitchell, as "one of the most impressive mass international campaigns of the 20th century." Davis stressed that the relative lack of celebrity Mitchell enjoys today in comparison to some contemporaries and later generations of women's movement and civil rights leaders involved in the same struggles is no indication of the impact her work has had. "I have never known anyone as consistent in her values, as collective in her outlook on life, as firm in her trajectory as a freedom fighter." At another tribute to Mitchell, at the CCDS Convention in Chicago, CCDS militant and leader Mildred Williamson said of Mitchell: "If it hadn't been for Charlene opening my eyes to many things and encouraging me, I wouldn't be here today, nor would I have been able to achieve many of the other things in my life."

In 1993, Charlene Mitchell attended the Foro de São Paulo in Havana as an observer from the CCDS. In 1994 she served as an official international observer of the first democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa and was an observer at the congress of the South African Communist Party that year. Also in 1994, she visited Namibia as a guest of the mines and energy ministry. In recent years, Charlene Mitchell returned to Cuba for rehabilitation medical treatment following a stroke suffered in 2007.