San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
First Black woman to run for president
Charlene Mitchell, who as the Communist Party’s presidential nominee in 1968 became the first Black woman to run for the White House, died Dec. 14 in New York. She was 92.
Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by her son, Steven Mitchell.
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 past 50 years, including feminism, civil rights, police violence, economic inequality and anti-colonialism.
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. 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, Argentine Marxist Che Guevara and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, pointed to 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.
Mitchell became the Communist Party’s presidential nominee when she was just 38. Her run for office came four years before 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 UCLA named Angela Davis.
After Davis was arrested in 1970 for providing weapons used
in the killing of a Marin County judge, Mitchell led her defense committee.
Davis was acquitted in 1972, and 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.
Charlene Alexander was born on June 8, 1930, in Cincinnati. When she was 9, Charlene, her parents and her seven siblings moved to Chicago. The family settled in Cabrini Homes, a mixed-race public-housing development that was a center of left-wing politics.
By the early 1940s she was 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.
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 Mitchell remained a committed socialist, she drifted from the Communist Party in the 1980s. But she remained committed to the values of the far left, and of communism as she understood it.
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.