“To Howl Loudly”: John Mitchell Jr. and his Campaign against Lynching in Virginia

"TOHOWLLOUDLY": JOHN MITCHELL JR. AND HIS CAMPAIGN AGAINST LYNCHING IN VIRGINIA FitzhughBrnndage If ... you Negroes are tired of being abused, misrepresented, Jim Crowed, lynched, burned at the stake and persecuted, then get up and do something for yourself. Marcus Gaivey at Richmond, Virginia, July 1922 1 Among the audience that listened to Marcus Garvey's speech in Richmond in 1922 was John L. Mitchell Jr., editor and publisher of the Richmond Planet, and one of the most outspoken black crusaders against mob violence in Virginia, indeed in the entire South. During the 1890s,when racial tensions and lynching had peaked in Virginia, Mitchell had managed to bridge the growing chasm dividing the races and had devised imaginative strategies to protest against lynching. Although overlooked and unappreciated by Garvey, Mitchell's campaign against lynchings is a powerful reminder that even during the nadir of race relations during the late nineteenth century, blacks were not simply sullen, powerless victims of mob violence. It is tempting to assume that fear of repression alone was sufficient to prevent blacks in the South from carrying out effective agitation against white violence. Even in Virginia, a state notable for relatively tranquil race relations (at least in comparison to the Deep South), aspiring AfricanAmerican leaders ignored the threat of retaliation at their own risk. The violent banishment of Alex Manly, the black editor of the Wilmington Record, from Wilmington, North Carolina, and the subsequent massacre of blacks in that city in 1898 underscored the possible consequences of offending local whites through inflammatory editorials, let alone racial organization.2 However, historians who assume that Manly's persecution was typical would do well to recall that in Richmond, Mitchell hammered away at the barbarity of Southern mobs without suffering reprisals from whites. Moreover, Mitchell's efforts went beyond stirring editorials and contributed in important, if unrecognized, ways to the campaign against mob violence in Virginia. 326 Fitzhugh Brundage Mitchell's activism merits attention precisely because it reveals the complexity of the tactics of the most creative black leaders in the postReconstruction South. Recent scholarship has alerted us to the dangers of conceiving of the leadership styles of such pre-eminent black leaders as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois as binary opposites. Instead, Houston A. Baker Jr. has suggested that we should more properly locate Washington's strategy of accommodation and Du Bois's strategy of militancy on a single "discursive plane," a plane framed by limited black resources and white prejudice. By conceiving of black leadership in terms of a threedimensional plane in which any strategy can be situated simultaneously on a horizontal axis of accommodation and a vertical axis of militancy, we can begin to understand the mixture of compromise and militancy that was present in the activism of many Southern blacks, including Mitchell. In conspicuous fashion, Mitchell experimented with leadership styles that were at once neither militant nor conciliatory; at various times, he attempted to mobilize the black community en masse and to appeal to sympathetic white elites for their intercession on behalf of blacks. That Mitchell never seems to have settled upon a single leadership strategy is less evidence of his own confusion or of the larger shortcomings of black leadership during the Jim Crow era than an example of the flexibilitywhich the harsh conditions of the South demanded of any black leader. 3 * * * Many of the skills which made Mitchell such an effective activist were honed during his childhood. Born in 1863to slave parents on the outskirts of Richmond, he grew up knowing at first-hand both the self-conscious gentility of the white elite and the deprivation of the black masses. After the Civil War, his parents continued to work for their former master, James Lyons, a prominent Richmond lawyer, and as a child he became "acquainted with all the rules of polite society" and acquired a natural ease and poise in the presence of Virginia's white elite. 4 Despite the strong objections of the Lyons family, his mother saw to it that he learned the rudiments of reading and writing. He began his formal education in a private school run by the Rev. Anthony Binga Jr. and then...