Arthur Wergs Mitchell

Arthur Wergs Mitchell (born December 22, 1880 or 1883, near Roanoke, Alabama, U.S.—died May 9, 1968, near Petersburg, Virginia) was an American politician who served as a congressman from Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1935 to 1943. He was the first Democratic African American politician to be elected to Congress, and he represented a district encompassing the South Side of Chicago. Mitchell was a staunch supporter of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which he saw as an economic boon to African Americans. He also worked as an attorney, and though he sometimes clashed with other Black leaders, he successfully waged several campaigns for civil rights.

Early life

Mitchell was born in a cabin near Roanoke, Alabama, to parents who had been enslaved. They farmed cotton on land that the family rented, and his father also worked as a logger. Mitchell was one of six children. His family nicknamed him “Beauty” or “Beaut.” As an adult Mitchell gave himself the middle name “Wergs,” the origin of which is a mystery to his biographers.

In 1897 Mitchell’s father and two younger sisters died of typhoid fever. When the family could not pay the medical fee, the doctor seized everything they had, including their home and unharvested crops. This turn of events forced Mitchell to find ways to support his mother and siblings.

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Relationship with Booker T. Washington and career as a school administrator

Mitchell traveled to Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1901, intending to enroll at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a school that had been founded by Booker T. Washington to provide practical vocational training for African Americans. He stayed with his uncle and worked as a dishwasher to afford the school’s entrance fee. As a student he was employed as an assistant in Washington’s office. Mitchell largely adopted Washington’s views on race relations, which advocated an accommodationist, or pragmatic, approach to Black advancement, instead of one rooted in protest politics (which was the strategy of W.E.B. Du Bois). He also learned important lessons from Washington about the exercise of power. However, during his second year, Mitchell left the school and finished his studies at Snow Hill Institute, a grammar and secondary school near Selma, Alabama.

After receiving a teaching license, Mitchell established the West Alabama Normal and Industrial Institute at Greensboro, an agricultural school for African Americans, in 1903. He managed it for more than a decade, through several relocations and allegations that the school exploited poor Black people for cheap labor and defrauded them of their land. At the same time, Mitchell advertised the school as having Washington’s stamp of approval. These practices caught the attention of his former mentor, who began warning potential donors against investing in Mitchell’s institute. Mitchell responded by threatening to expose some of Washington’s personal letters and telegrams that revealed compromising information about his personal life. Mitchell’s school closed amid further controversy in 1915, when a fire destroyed the main building, and Mitchell collected the insurance money. He then took a position directing the Armstrong Agricultural Institute in West Butler, Alabama.

During this time Mitchell began dabbling in real estate, and he spent his summers in the North taking courses at Harvard and Columbia universities in nondegree programs. He also started a family of his own, marrying Eula Mae King, with whom he had a son, Arthur Wergs Mitchell, Jr. After King died in 1910, Arthur Wergs Mitchell, Sr., married Annie Harris, a teacher and government worker.

Political career and civil rights activism

In 1919 Mitchell moved with his family to Washington, D.C., where he founded the Mutual Housing Company, which aimed to improve housing conditions for African Americans. He also began studying law independently, and in 1927 he was admitted to the bar. (Like most Black attorneys admitted before 1935, he did not attend law school.) He joined a Black social fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma, eventually becoming its president. His involvement with the fraternity ultimately led to his entering politics as a member of the Republican Party.

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However, in 1929 Mitchell moved to Chicago after accepting a position to run the local campaign for Republican presidential nominee Herbert Hoover. He soon changed his affiliation to the Democratic Party, having concluded that there were more opportunities for advancement than in the GOP, which at the time had more Black officials compared with the Democrats.

In 1934 Mitchell ran in the Democratic primary for the majority-Black congressional district on the South Side of Chicago. He lost narrowly to another candidate, Harry Baker, but Baker died before the general election, and party leaders chose Mitchell to take his place. Later that year he defeated Oscar De Priest, a Black Republican, with 53 percent of the vote.

Throughout his time in Congress, Mitchell reliably supported Roosevelt (who was elected president in 1933) and his policies. Mitchell believed that the New Deal had created the best conditions for African Americans since emancipation (ratified in 1865). At the beginning of his legislative career, he told the Boston Daily Globe, “What I am interested in is to help this grand president of ours feed the hungry and clothe the naked and provide work for the idle of every race and creed over which floats the Stars and Stripes.” He also defended Roosevelt’s 1937 plan to add more justices to the Supreme Court, according to the view that the court had often applied the Fourteenth Amendment to protect large corporations instead of using it to guarantee equal rights for all citizens.

In the mid-1930s Mitchell positioned himself as a champion of anti-lynching measures. In 1935 he introduced his own anti-lynching bill in Congress instead of supporting those of other legislators, which were backed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The organization’s leaders doubted his motives, claiming that Mitchell’s bill offered limited protections in order to appeal to white lawmakers. The president of the NAACP’s Chicago branch called Mitchell “public enemy number one among Negroes.” For his part, in 1936 Mitchell called his proposed legislation “the only bill that is going to pass,” and he introduced this same bill during each of his four terms in office. However, after his bill failed in the House the second time it was introduced, he put his support behind the NAACP-backed legislation, declaring, “The authorship of this bill means absolutely nothing as compared with the importance of its passage.” (A federal anti-lynching bill, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, was at last signed into law in 2022.)

In 1940 Mitchell introduced a successful bill to fund the American Negro Exposition in Chicago; the event commemorated the 75th anniversary of the end of American chattel slavery. That same year he took a stand against his party’s leadership by voting to dissolve the House select committee investigating “un-American activities” (i.e., communist sympathies). In 1942, amid the push to end the poll tax that was used to discriminate against Black voters in many Southern states, he spoke out against southern Democrats who opposed eliminating the tax.

Alongside his career in Congress, Mitchell fought for civil rights as a private citizen. In 1937 he sued three railroad companies after he was forced to leave his first-class seat on a train in Arkansas for a “filthy and foul smelling” second-class car designated for Black passengers. The Supreme Court ruled on the case in 1941, declaring that Black passengers had the right to equal accommodations and treatment during interstate travel. (The decision did not address segregation itself, which was not banned in interstate railroad transportation until 1955.)

However, Mitchell’s railroad lawsuit cost him the support of Chicago’s powerful Democratic political machine, which had ordered him not to pursue the case. In 1942 the Chicago machine backed a rival candidate, and Mitchell declined to run for reelection.

Post-Congress career and death

Mitchell moved to a farm in Virginia and continued practicing law while also growing roses and living the life of a country gentleman. His second wife died in 1947, and a year later he married Clara Smith Mann. In his post-Congress career, Mitchell occasionally served as an adviser to the U.S. War Department and was involved in the Southern Regional Council, an interracial organization dedicated to fighting poverty and racial injustice. He died at his farm in 1968.