For Orange Mound’s Mary Mitchell, Harris’ inauguration is a blessing
It was 1950 when the white woman who Mary Mitchell kept house for during the summer pulled her aside for a talk.
The woman's son, Johnny, was about to turn 12. After his birthday party, the woman explained, Mitchell would have to start addressing him as Mr. Johnny. Thing was, Mitchell was 14.
It was bad enough that Black people decades older than her often had to address white people and their children with courtesy titles as white people refused to do the same for them.
Bad enough that many white people would call the Black housekeeper Ann and not Miss Annette, while expecting Black people to attach a whole honorific to their full first names.
So, for Mitchell, the prospect of calling a white boy two years younger than her Mister when he would never have to call her Miss regardless of her age, was both awkward and appalling.
She said no.
“I was just two years older than him, and I'd been taking him to the park, taking him to get ice cream, and after his birthday party I'm going to have to start calling him Mister?” Mitchell recalled. “I said, ‘I'll never do it.'
“Well, she fired me. I just went on home. Didn't look back.”
But when Kamala Harris was inaugurated as Madam Vice President, Mitchell, who is 84, saw a title that was once denied to Black people like her bestowed on a Black and Asian woman.
Just as she did 12 years ago, when she saw the title of Mr. President bestowed on the nation's first Black president, Barack Obama.
And while Mitchell doesn't know whether Johnny's mother is turning in her grave or will be turning off her television at the thought of a Black woman being Vice President, what she does know is that she was blessed to see someone like Harris become next-inline for the presidency.
“I'm so glad God helped me to live to see this, I don't know what to do,” said Mitchell, who is known as Orange Mound's Maya Angelou.
“This was all about God … when God had Joe Biden as Obama's vice president, God knew what he was doing. When they raise their hands and take that oath, people will be turning flips in the street …
“This is the beginning of a whole new America.”
But this new America is actually the latest stage of the one that Black people like Mitchell seeded with their resistance decades ago.
Her refusal to call a white child mister just to keep a job evolved into the kind of defiance that powered the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins, and the civil rights marches here that Mitchell joined.
Mitchell welcomed Martin Luther King Jr. to Orange Mound, where the Orange Mound Mobilizers acted as his security force as he ate meals at its restaurants and got his hair cut at its barbershops.
That defiant spirit led her to risk losing her job as the first Black director of records at St. Jude Children's Hospital in 1968, when she was told that she couldn't take off work to attend King's funeral service in Atlanta.
“I told them that I had to go to his funeral because I went to the marches here in Memphis, but they told me I couldn't go,” Mitchell said.
“I told them they let the Jewish people off for Yom Kippur, and the Italian people off for Columbus Day. So, I wrote them a letter and told them that King was our king, and that I was going, and I'd accept the consequences when I got back.”
Mitchell wasn't fired. She ultimately enrolled at Lemoyne-owen College in 1980, at age 44, where she earned a degree in philosophy and began chronicling the history of Orange Mound, the South's first Black residential community, to tell its story of Black strength and resilience.
That's why, when Mitchell saw Biden and Harris take their oaths, it didn't just represent a continuation of a story of Black resilience, but a triumph over the forces that have feverishly worked to break it.
Those forces, egged on by Trump's lies about the election being stolen, showed up at the Capitol on Jan. 6. They trashed the building, left six people dead, threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence and kill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the electoral votes were being counted.
That reminded Mitchell of the days of racial terror; days when a Black person might be beaten or lynched not only for trying to vote, but for many perceived slights.
“When I saw that, I cried,” Mitchell said. “I had a merry-go-round of emotions. I was angry. I cussed. I had a whole encyclopedia of emotions…
“But it took Trump to bring that out of them, because now, we know who they are. You would have never thought that a professor from somewhere, or a lawyer or doctor from somewhere, would have that kind of tyranny in their hearts…”
But when Mitchell cried during the inauguration, she cried tears of joy.
The joy came from knowing the white nationalists who stormed the Capitol to try to keep Trump in power failed.
She was joyful because, after eight decades on this earth and in this nation, Mitchell witnessed the latest incarnation of Black progress that people like herself began long ago, when they decided that being equal players in American life was more important than existing in it.
Also, Mitchell said, when she saw Biden and Harris sworn in, and Raphael Warnock sworn in as the first Black senator from Georgia and the first Black Democratic senator elected from a former Confederate state, she also saw the work of God.
“I had hope that this would happen in my lifetime,” she said. “What happened in Georgia was all about God.
“God's got this, baby. All we have to do is hold tight and everything will be alright. This is a revelation and a revolution.”
A revolution that Johnny's mother can't stop. No matter whether she is.
Listen to Tonyaa's conversation with Faith Morris, chief marketing and external affairs officer with the National Civil Rights Museum, on this week's podcast, "20 With Tonyaa." as they discuss "Where Do We Go From Here?"
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Tonyaa Weathersbee at 901568-3281, tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com or follow her on Twitter @tonyaajw.