[ “People who truly believe in justice and equality, and peace
and socialism, should not actually really care whether their
contributions are individually noted,” Angela Davis asserted at a
tribute to her friend and mentor, Charlene Mitchell, in 2009.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

CELEBRATING THE LEADERSHIP AND COMRADESHIP OF CHARLENE MITCHELL  
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William P. Jones
June 17, 2023
Portside
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_ “People who truly believe in justice and equality, and peace and
socialism, should not actually really care whether their contributions
are individually noted,” Angela Davis asserted at a tribute to her
friend and mentor, Charlene Mitchell, in 2009. _

, CoC Education Fund

 

_Tributes to Charlene Mitchell: Organizer and Strategist for Freedom
and Justice_ (New York, Committees of Correspondence Education Fund
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2023)

 

Crediting Mitchell with transforming the lives of people across the
United States and “literally all over the world,” Davis pointed
out that whether she was “out front” or doing “that invisible
organizing work,” Mitchell was “totally satisfied to see the
fruits of her labor unfold as they do without necessarily being
singled out for her accomplishments.”

 

Thanks to Davis, and historians Genna Rae McNeil and Erik McDuffie,
Mitchell was not completely overlooked when she passed away in
December of 2022, at the age of 92. “Black Lives Matter and modern
Black feminism stand on the shoulders of Charlene Mitchell,”
McDuffie stated in a _New York Times_ obituary that traced the roots
of those contemporary movements to the National Alliance Against
Racist and Political Repression, which Mitchell initiated to defend
Davis and other Black radicals from persecution in the 1970s.

 

Further evidence of that influence is provided by _Tributes to
Charlene Mitchell: Organizer and Strategist for Freedom and
Justice._ Published by the Committees of Correspondence Education
Fund, the volume contains statements from activists ranging from
political prisoners including Davis, Ben Chavis and Frank Chapman to
labor leaders like Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Coraminita Mahr; U.S. based
scholars Lisa Brock, Bettina Aptheker, and Michael Honey, to South
African radicals Chris Matlhako and Raymond Suttner. 

 

Purchase a copy of _Tributes to Charlene Mitchell_
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View a celebration of Charlene Mitchell held at the Riverside Church
in New York City on May 13, 2023
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Tellingly, the tributes emphasize Mitchell’s personal warmth and
interest in individual lives as much as her tremendous skill as an
organizer and advocate. “What I have most appreciated over these
years is her amazing ability to discover ethical connections between
the political and the personal, the global and the local,” Davis
writes; “I don’t think I have ever known someone as consistent in
her values, as collective in her outlook on life, as firm in her
trajectory as a freedom fighter.” California activist Jack Kurzweil
writes, simply, “Charlene was the only person in my life who could
phone me, tell me what to do, and have me do it right away.”

 

Born in Cincinnati during the Great Depression, Mitchell saw from an
early age how the criminal legal system targeted Black people for
their political beliefs as well as their race and poverty. At the 2009
tribute, Genna Rae McNeil recounted one of Mitchell’s earliest
memories of visiting her father, a Pullman Porter and laborer who was
jailed for union organizing after moving the family to Chicago. At the
age of 13, she joined the Communist-affiliated American Youth for
Democracy and led a protest that ended racial segregation at a local
theater. Inspired by Communists’ opposition to racism and economic
exploitation, she joined the party in 1946, when its membership peaked
at 75,000, only to be forced underground to avoid arrest as government
repression and disillusionment with the Soviet Union depleted its
ranks in the 1950s.

 

Mitchell’s attention to the intersections between race, class and
imperialism helped renew the Communist movement among young radicals
in the 1960s. Moving to Los Angeles, she established a Black chapter
of the party named for Argentine and Congolese revolutionaries, Che
Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, and travelled widely to establish ties
between the US party and anti-colonial activists in Africa and Latin
America. She ran for President on the Communist ticket in 1968, on a
platform of peace in Vietnam, racial equality, and economic justice
for all.

 

She received barely a thousand votes but drew far more attention to
the party by leading Angela Davis’ defense. An assistant professor
at the University of California, Davis was fired due to her membership
in the Communist Party, and after protests secured her reinstatement,
charged with providing weapons to a younger activist who killed a
judge in a desperate attempt to free his older brother from prison.
Placing the case in a broader context of a racially and economically
biased criminal legal system, Mitchel stated; “Angela Davis
struggles especially for the freedom of political prisoners, and the
ending of a prison system of which a major aim is to punish people on
the basis of their color and their class, a prison system that
attempts to dehumanize rather than rehabilitate, a prison system that
intensifies the inherent racism of U.S. capitalism.”

 

Building an international campaign that secured Davis’ acquittal in
1972, Mitchell established the National Alliance Against Racism and
Political Repression to defend Black radicals against the rising
backlash of the 1970s and 1980s. These included civil rights leader
Benjamin Chavis, who was sentenced along with nine others to 29 years
in prison on evidence later shown to have been fabricated; Assata
Shakur, a Black Liberation Army militant who was imprisoned under
conditions that the UN Commission on Human Rights called “totally
unbefitting any prisoner;” and Joan Little, who was charged with
murder for killing a guard who attempted to rape her in a jail cell.
The National Alliance also supported activists targeted for their
roles in the Puerto Rican independence movement and the American
Indian Movement and played a central role in building international
pressure to free Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders in
South Africa.

 

Extending Mitchell’s analysis of Angela Davis’ situation, the
National Alliance asserted an expansive view of political repression
as targeting not just ideological dissent but any act of rebellion
against an unjust society. Genna Rae McNeil explains that Mitchell
brought a systemic analysis to Joan Little’s defense, arguing that
her actions could not be understood in isolation from her gender,
poverty and restricted access to education and employment. Insisting
on Little’s right to defend herself from sexual assault, McNeil
explained, the campaign defined political prisoners as “people who
were in prison as a direct result of their political beliefs and
activities as well as people who were caught up in a web of political
repression and therefore victimized by the system.”

 

Some will rightly ask how Mitchell developed such a powerful critique
of the U.S. legal system while seemingly ignoring political repression
in the Soviet Union. It should be noted that she became a Communist
during the Second World War, when the U.S. government allied with the
Soviets in a war against fascism. It may be that she adopted a similar
view of international Communism as a powerful ally rather than an
exact model for a just society. It also makes sense that she
prioritized the struggle for freedom in her home country, where she
and her family and friends faced persecution and exploitation, over
those abroad. Significantly, the Communist Party was one of the few
multiracial organizations on the left that did not fracture along
racial lines in the late 1960s and 1970s.

 

But we should also recall that Mitchell initiated the National
Alliance in an era when the United States was emerging as an
uncontested global leader in human caging. By the end of the
20thcentury, incarceration rates in the United States surpassed those
of the Soviet Union at the height of the Gulag and of South Africa
under apartheid. Her analysis of race and class has grown even more
pressing with the rise of mass incarceration.

 

Ultimately, Charlene Mitchell joined others who were committed to
reforming communism in both at home and abroad. Frustrated by
nostalgia among older communists for the industrial working class, she
pushed the party to embrace the opportunities created by the rise of
an increasingly female and multi-racial workforce in the service
economy. When reports of Glasnost and Perestroika began to circulate
within the U.S. Communist Party, she assembled those who favored open
discussion and support for democratic reform in the Soviet bloc. That
led to Mitchell’s exclusion, along with Davis and others from party
leadership. The sidelining of such prominent Black leaders was
particularly offensive to those committed to multiracial organizing,
leading to the resignation of nearly a third of party
members. Joining with other leftists, the dissidents formed the
Committees of Correspondence to rebuild a democratic and non-partisan
left.

 

I was lucky to have the chance to work with Charlene during that
period on campaigns to support unions of housekeeping and farm workers
and to fight cuts to food and housing assistance programs in North
Carolina. I witnessed firsthand her tremendous skill as an organizer,
which drew not only on decades of experience and sharp analysis but
also on rich networks of friends and allies that she seemed to have in
cities and small towns across the state. I also benefited from the
warmth and comradeship that resonate throughout the memories shared
in _Tributes to Charlene Mitchell. _Charlene welcomed me into her
home, showed me around her neighborhood in Harlem, and even organized
a shower for my first child.

 

As Angela Davis pointed out in her 2009 tribute to Charlene, it is not
the personal recognition of heroic acts that matters as much as the
historical memory of collective action and what it
accomplished. _Tributes to Charlene Mitchell _provides critical
material for that historical memory, rooted in the reminiscences of
those who worked closely with her over many decades. They remind us
that collective action requires careful analysis and persistent
organization, but also personal connection and understanding. For that
model, as well as her contributions to the struggle for a better
world, we should hold dear the memory of Charlene Mitchell.

 

_[WILLIAM P. JONES is Professor of History at the University of
Minnesota and author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and
the Forgotten History of Civil Rights
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* Charlene Mitchell
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* Black Liberation
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* African Americans
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* Black Women
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* Racism
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* Communist Party
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* CPUSA
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* Communism
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* socialism
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* Committees of Correspondence
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* Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
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* CCDS
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* NAARPR
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* National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression
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* Angela Davis
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* Free Angela
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* Political Prisoners
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* Internationalism
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* peace movement
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* Anti-apartheid
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* 1960s
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* Women
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