[ Charlene Mitchell led a long and multi-faceted political career,
including first Black woman to run for President, leader of the
movement against racial and political repression, advocate for
democracy, socialism and internationalism. ]
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CHARLENE MITCHELL, 92, DIES; FIRST BLACK WOMAN TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT
 
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Clay Risen
December 23, 2022
New York Times
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_ Charlene Mitchell led a long and multi-faceted political career,
including first Black woman to run for President, leader of the
movement against racial and political repression, advocate for
democracy, socialism and internationalism. _

, People’s World Archives

 

Charlene Mitchell, who as the Communist Party’s presidential nominee
in 1968 became the first Black woman to run for the White House, died
on Dec. 14 in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by her son, Steven
Mitchell.

Ms. Mitchell joined the Communist Party in 1946, when she was just 16,
and over her long career worked at the intersection of issues that
have come to define the left’s agenda for the last 50 years,
including feminism, civil rights, police violence, economic inequality
and anticolonialism.

Her rise in the party leadership came at a moment of crisis. The
Communists had been decimated by the repressive tactics of the
McCarthy era, then by the exodus of members disaffected by the Soviet
invasion of Hungary in 1956. By the late 1950s it counted barely
10,000 members, down from its height of about 75,000 in 1947.

To find new recruits, the party drew on its roots in radical civil
rights activism to appeal to a new generation of Black leaders. Ms.
Mitchell joined the party’s national committee in 1958; she was its
youngest member ever.

In the 1960s, she founded an all-Black chapter in Los Angeles called
the Che-Lumumba Club, which quickly became one of the most active in
the country. The club’s choice of namesakes, the Argentine Marxist
Che Guevara and the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, pointed to Ms.
Mitchell’s abiding insistence that the American left had to be
rooted in an international matrix of freedom struggles.;

She traveled widely, meeting fellow leftists in Europe, South America
and Africa, and she was among the first Americans to highlight the
plight of Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle in South
Africa. By 1968 she was one of the best-known and most widely
respected American Communist leaders.

“I don’t know of anything that Charlene was involved in where she
was not the leader,” Mildred Williamson, who met Ms. Mitchell at
a 1973 anti-apartheid conference
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Chicago, said in a phone interview.

Ms. Mitchell became the Communist Party's presidential nominee when
she was just 38. At its convention in Manhattan, she accepted the
nomination below a banner that read “Black and White Unite to Fight
Racism — Poverty — War!”

“We plan to put an open-occupancy sign on the White House lawn,”
she declared and, taking a swipe at the pet project of the first lady,
Lady Bird Johnson, added, “We propose to put a woman in that house
to beautify not only our highways but to beautify ourselves.”

Her run for office came four years before the New York congresswoman
Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to seek the nomination
for president from a major party.

Though she and her running mate, Michael_ _Zagarell, appeared on just
four state ballots and received just over 1,000 votes, her candidacy
put a new face on the Communist Party at a time when the student-led
New Left was gaining ground in left-wing politics and some party
members had grown disillusioned with its uncritical support of the
Soviet Union.

In contrast to the student movement, which was largely male,
middle-class and white, she offered a vision of the left that was
rooted in the experience of working-class women of color. Among her
acolytes was an assistant professor at the University of California,
Los Angeles, named Angela Davis.

After Dr. Davis was arrested in 1970 for providing weapons used in the
killing of a Marin County judge, Ms. Mitchell led her defense
committee.

Dr. Davis was acquitted in 1972, and Ms. Mitchell used the experience
to create the National Alliance Against Racist and Political
Repression, a group that, in its focus on police brutality and the
legal system, foreshadowed later racial justice movements.

“Black Lives Matter and modern Black feminism stand on the shoulders
of Charlene Mitchell,” Erik S. McDuffie, a professor of African
American studies at the University of Illinois, said in a phone
interview.

Among Ms. Mitchell’s many successful campaigns was the acquittal of
Joan Little, a North Carolina inmate accused of murdering a prison
guard who had sexually assaulted her. She also lobbied on behalf of
the Wilmington 10, a group of nine Black men and one woman, also in
North Carolina, who were convicted of arson and conspiracy in 1971 and
later exonerated.

“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,” Dr. Davis said at a 2009 event
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Charlene Alexander was born on June 8, 1930, in Cincinnati. Her
parents were part of the Great Migration of Black Southerners who
moved north in the first part of the 20th century — her father,
Charles, came from Georgia and her mother, Naomi (Taylor) Alexander,
from Tennessee.

Her marriages to Bill Mitchell and Michael Welch both ended in
divorce. Along with her son, she is survived by two brothers, Deacon
Alexander and Mike Wolfson.

When she was 9, Charlene, her parents and her seven siblings moved to
Chicago, where her father worked as a Pullman porter and a hod
carrier. He was also active in the labor movement and served as a
precinct captain for Representative William L. Dawson, one of the few
Black members of Congress.

The family settled in Cabrini Homes, a mixed-race public-housing
development on Chicago’s Near North Side, which was a center of
left-wing politics. When she was 13, Charlene joined the local branch
of American Youth for Democracy, the youth branch of the Communist
Party.

By the early 1940s she was already an activist, helping to lead a
protest against a nearby theater, the Windsor, that required Black
patrons to sit in the balcony. Black and white students, attending a
matinee, simply switched places one day, and the theater dropped its
segregation policy soon after.

Ms. Mitchell studied briefly at Herzl Junior College in Chicago (now
Malcolm X College). She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and to
New York City in 1968.

Although Ms. Mitchell remained a committed socialist, she drifted from
the Communist Party in the 1980s, especially after the death of Henry
Winston
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its most prominent Black leader, in 1986. The party, she came to
believe, was becoming too focused on class issues at the expense of
fighting racial and other injustices.

“I am not suggesting that all of a sudden there was racism in the
party, or that some people were mean, or anything like that,” she
said in a 1993 interview
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“You had a situation where attention to certain questions that
African American comrades felt were important was downgraded.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ms. Mitchell joined more
than 100 other party members in calling for the party to reject
Leninism and take a more democratic socialist path. In retaliation,
the party’s longtime general secretary, Gus Hall, froze them out of
subsequent national committee meetings.

Ms. Mitchell later left the party to help found the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, which sought to rebuild
the left along more pluralistic lines.

But she remained committed to the values of the far left, and of
communism as she understood it.

“The country’s rulers want to keep Black and white working people
apart,” she said in a 1968 campaign speech. “The Communist Party
is dedicated to the idea that — whatever the difficulties — they
must be brought together, or neither can advance.”

_Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The Times. Previously, he
was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on
the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of “Bourbon: The
Story of Kentucky Whiskey.” @risenc [[link removed]]_

_Get the best of The Times in your inbox.
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* Charlene Mitchell
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* Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
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* Communist Party USA
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* Angela Davis
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