Mitchell, Arthur W(ergs) (1883–1968)

US representative. Born near Lafayette, Alabama, Mitchell grew up on a farm. In 1897 he went to Tuskegee Institute, where he worked as an office boy for Booker T Washington. He taught in rural schools in Georgia and Alabama and then founded and served ten years as president of the Armstrong Agricultural School in West Butler, Alabama. He studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1927, and began practising in Washington, DC, before moving to Chicago (1929), where he engaged in the real estate business while practising law. Like most black Americans up to that time, he had entered political life as a Republican, but with President Roosevelt's New Deal he switched to the Democratic Party. In 1934 he defeated the venerable Republican black American Oscar De Priest, to become the first Democratic black American in the US House of Representatives (Illinois, 1935–43). An outspoken liberal, he denounced the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and nominated black youths to the US military academies. After he had been forced out of a Pullman car in Arkansas, he sued for the right of black Americans to receive the same accommodations as whites in interstate transportation, and argued his case before the US Supreme Court (Mitchell vs. USA et al., 1941), although it was 1955 before the practice was changed. He continued to fight for the rights of black Americans – in 1942 proposing to outlaw all poll taxes on the grounds that if blacks could fight for the USA they were entitled to vote. On leaving the House he settled in Petersburg, Virginia, and remained active as a lecturer and with such organizations as the Southern Regional Council.