Henry Mitchell

Photo of Henry Mitchell. Reproduced from Charlottesville Bridge Builders.

Henry Bryant Mitchell (1919-2002) was the first Black Virginian to attend Virginia Theological Seminary and the first Black member of the Charlottesville School Board. He was a pivotal leader in Charlottesville's Black community throughout the era of the civil rights movement. He is also the subject of a painting by Frances Brand.

Early life

Childhood

Mitchell was born in 1919 in Ahoskie, North Carolina. Growing up in this rural town of approximately 5,000 people, Mitchell was one of three siblings. His father died when he was only three years old, while his mother (who eventually remarried) worked as a laundress for several white families in the area. The family lived in a small, three bedroom wooden house with no insulation and holes in the floorboards. Mitchell also had cousins who lived in the surrounding area and labored as sharecroppers. The family was raised as ardent Southern Baptists at Ahoskie Baptist Church.

Living in an extremely racially-segregated region, Mitchell would ride the bus in the mornings past at least two white schools before arriving at his own school in Winton, North Carolina (about ten miles away from his home). For nine months throughout the year, Mitchell and other black students did not attend school - when the harvest season arrived, the black schools were shut down and the children were expected to work in the fields.

Education, early career, and marriage

Despite the family's precarious financial situation, Mitchell's mother, who herself belonged to a family with a tradition of teaching and hence placed heavy value on education, managed to send all three of her children to college, with Mitchell and his oldest sister attending Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia. Mitchell graduated from the school in 1938 with a bachelor's degree in history.

Moving to Raleigh, North Carolina immediately after graduating from Hampton, Mitchell worked his first job as a teacher for a few years at a special education school. There he met Gertrude Marian Philips, a woman from a middle-class Black family who was working as a secretary at the school. The two quickly fell in love and married, moving in with Gertrude's parents in Hampton, Virginia.

Career

Family life in Hampton

Mitchell and Gertrude had two children while in Hampton, with Carolyn being born in 1944 and Bryant in 1947. Soon after Bryant's birth, Mitchell felt it was unfair to Gertrude's parents to live in their house with their children and thus moved the family to temporary housing in Newsome Park, another district of Hampton. After about a year, the family bought a brick townhouse in Newport News, Virginia and stayed there until around 1951, when they returned to Hampton after Gertrude's father sold her and Mitchell some land he owned across the street from his house. The family would raise their children there for the next few years in the company of Gertrude's parents and siblings. Throughout this time, Mitchell worked as a postman and as a real estate agent on weekends, while Gertrude worked as a stenographer at Langley Air Force Base. The family owned a 1954 Chrysler Windsor Deluxe and frequently went on road trips across the country.

While in Hampton, Mitchell and his family were subjected to much of the racially-based discrimination that was common in the South at that time. For instance, Mitchell's son Bryan recalled how on one occasion, Mitchell took him to a local drug store to get something to drink. While Mitchell ordered their drinks at the bar, Bryant sat down at the counter. Because Black individuals were only allowed to stand at the counter, the white owner of the store approached Bryant and rudely told him to get off the seat. Mitchell swiftly intervened and angrily warned the store owner not to touch his son, at which point the store owner quickly desisted. Mitchell then left the store with his son, an incident which Bryant later described as his first memory of his father standing up for him in the face of legally-mandated segregation.

Seminary and ministry

Soon after marrying Gertrude, Mitchell began attending the Episcopal church to which she and her family belonged. He quickly became enamored with the church's organization and traditions and, despite Gertrude's doubts, began to consider a career as a priest. He originally planned on attending divinity school in New York City; however, the white Episcopal Bishop of Virginia at that time, Reverend Frederick Deane Goodwin, encouraged Mitchell to instead apply to seminary in Virginia so that he would be able to keep an eye on him. As a result, in 1955, Mitchell became the first Black man to attend Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. After three years of study, he graduated with a master's degree in divinity and was assigned to three Virginian mission churches in Danville, Halifax, and Chatham. Mitchell's family moved into a boardinghouse in Danville (due to the local Black community not possessing options for temporary places to live) while he rotated which Sunday he would minister each congregation. During this time, Gertrude served as an organist and Bryant as an altar boy at every church service. In 1958, Mitchell was given a permanent assignment to Trinity Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia and moved there with his family.

Charlottesville and civil rights activism

Mitchell was a very successful minister during his time at Trinity Episcopal Church and eventually built an entirely-new, integrated church near the grounds of the University of Virginia. However, soon after moving to Charlottesville, Mitchell took notice of the fact that in a university town with a permanent population of about 35,000 people, there existed no Black middle class. Indeed, the city had no black lawyers and only one black doctor who did not even possess hospital privileges at the UVA Hospital. Believing that there was a leadership gap among Charlottesville's Black population, Mitchell quickly began to fill the perceived void, organizing several poverty programs and founding Camp Faith as a summer camp for impoverished children from the city. Living in the area for the next 18 years, Mitchell became chairman of the local Democratic Party, a member of the Charlottesville School Board, a member of the regional NAACP chapter, and one of the most influential Black individuals in the entire city.

Mitchell and his family often participated in picket lines against certain stores in Charlottesville as part of the civil rights movement. During one such picket line in 1959, a white man spit on Mitchell's daughter Carolyn. Bryant, enraged at the great act of disrespect towards his sister, prepared to fight the man but was held back by Mitchell, who informed his son that he was not to raise a fist against anyone as they were partaking in a nonviolent movement. Throughout this time period, Mitchell also occasionally received hate mail and phone calls from individuals who opposed his activism, but he never spoke about it in detail around his family so as not to frighten them.

Around 1960, Mitchell became heavily involved in the integration suit against the Charlottesville School System which, as part of a state-wide political stratagem known as "Massive resistance," was refusing to desegregate in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. He named his son Bryant as one of 14 plaintiffs in the suit. Despite their best efforts, Mitchell and the plaintiffs were unable to achieve the integration of Charlottesville's public schools at that time. Both men were later featured in the 1987 documentary Eyes on the Prize, where they were depicted walking into the Harrisonburg Western Federal District Courthouse for trial.

Mitchell tutored Bryant at their house for a year after the trial before sending him to Solebury School, a coeducational Quaker school in New Hope, Pennsylvania. A few years later, when Bryant was drafted by the Charlottesville draft board for service in Vietnam, Mitchell offered him enough money to defect but the young man strongly refused, believing that his childhood friends in Charlottesville never had the same privileges he did and so he would not be able to live with his conscience if he was to now find a way out of the military.

Later life and death

Mitchell later served as an urban affairs expert in Michigan before retiring to Alexandria in 1985. He served as an associate priest at Immanuel Episcopal Church-on-the-Hill and occasionally taught classes at Virginia Theological Seminary, where he also served on the board of trustees. In 2002, Mitchell died of renal failure at Inova Fairfax Hospital. He was survived by his wife, two children, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.