Mitchell, Clarence, Jr.

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Mitchell, Clarence, Jr.

March 8, 1911
March 18, 1984

The lawyer and lobbyist Clarence Maurice Mitchell Jr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Clarence Maurice Mitchell Sr., a chef in a fancy Annapolis restaurant, and Elsie Davis Mitchell. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he received an A.B. degree in 1932. The following year he joined the Baltimore Afro-American as a reporter and columnist, covering the trials of the Scottsboro Boys and reporting on racial violence in Princess Anne County, Maryland. In 1934 he ran unsuccessfully for the Maryland House of Delegates on the Socialist Party ticket. In 1937 he spent a year doing graduate work at the Atlanta School of Social Work, briefly became Maryland

state director of the Negro National Youth Administration, and married activist Juanita Jackson. The couple had four children, two of whom were later elected to local office in Baltimore.

In 1938 Mitchell was named executive secretary of the National Urban League branch in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he established his expertise in labor questions. In 1942 he became assistant director of Negro Manpower Service in the War Manpower Commission, and at the same time served on the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). The next year, he joined the FEPC full time and became associate director of its Division of Field Operation. He supervised antidiscrimination efforts until the committee was disbanded in 1946.

In 1946 Mitchell joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as labor secretary in the organization's Washington bureau, where he cemented ties with organized labor and lobbied for civil rights legislation. Mitchell organized the National Council for a Permanent FEPC and pushed for enforcement of executive orders banning discrimination. In 1949 he blocked the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization from locating at the University of Maryland because of the university's discriminatory practices. The following year he became head of the Washington bureau of the NAACP.

In November 1949 Mitchell called a National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization Conference in order to form a broad-based interracial pressure group for equality that would be built on the nucleus of the National Council for a Permanent FEPC. In January 1950 delegates from sixty organizations met and formed a steering committee, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Mitchell was appointed legislative chairman and served in that role for the next twenty-eight years. As the chief civil rights lobbyist on Capitol Hill, Mitchell was such a ubiquitous figure in Congress that he was often known as the hundred-andfirst senator. A courteous, gentle man, he formed alliances with both Democrats (notably Senator and later President Lyndon B. Johnson) and Republicans (such as Senator Everett Dirksen). In 1957 Mitchell marshaled support for a civil rights bill, the first since Reconstruction. He aided the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1960, 1964, and 1968, as well as the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its extension in 1975.

Mitchell was known for his devotion to legal processes. He once explained that "when you have a law, you have an instrument that will work for you permanently," whereas private agreements were more ephemeral. He was also willing to protest personally against discrimination. In 1956 he became nationally known when he was arrested in Florence, Alabama, for using a whites-only door to the railroad station, an incident that became a cause célèbre. In 1958 he entered the University of Maryland's evening law school, obtaining his law degree in 1962. In 1968 Mitchell opposed the efforts of civil rights supporters to procure an executive order banning housing discrimination and pushed President Lyndon Johnson to recommend congressional legislation. For his success in bringing about the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which provided legal protection against discrimination in rental housing, the NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal in 1969.

In 1975 Mitchell was named a member of the United States delegation at the United Nations by President Gerald Ford. After his retirement in 1978 Mitchell served as a consultant and operated a law practice. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1984. The following year the Baltimore city courthouse was named in his honor.