Dear VA-Histers,

I would like to invite you to the next in the Library of Virginia's noon
book talks.  On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, Ann Field Alexander will speak
on her book Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the "Fighting Editor," John
Mitchell Jr. published by the University of Virginia Press.  Dr. Alexander
is Professor of History at Mary Baldwin College and director of the
College's regional center in Roanoke, Virginia.  The book will be available
in the Library Shop and a book signing in the lobby will follow the lecture.

Dr. Alexander's presentation at the Library is especially significant
because the Library of Virginia has many issues of the Planet as well as
other rare African American newspapers.  The Virginia Newspaper Project
highlighted these holdings in an online exhibition entitled " 'Born in the
Wake of Freedom': John Mitchell, Jr." located on the LVA website under "Who
We Are" and then "Exhibitions."

John Mitchell Jr., the editor and publisher of the Richmond Planet, was well
known to many black, and not a few white, Americans in his day.  During his
career as an editor, politician, and businessman, Mitchell followed the
trajectory of optimism, bitter disappointment, and retrenchment that
characterized African American life in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow
South. Best known for his crusade against lynching in the 1880s, Mitchell
was also involved in a number of civil rights crusades that seem more
contemporary to the 1950s and 1960s than the turn of that century. He led a
boycott against segregated streetcars in 1904 and fought residential
segregation in Richmond in 1911. His political career included eight years
on the Richmond city council, which ended with disenfranchisement in 1896.

As Jim Crow strengthened its hold on the South, Mitchell, like many African
American leaders, turned to creating strong financial institutions within
the black community. He became a bank president and continued to publish the
Planet. A year after he ran for governor in 1921, Mitchell's fortunes
suffered a drastic reversal. His bank failed, and he was convicted of fraud
and sentenced to three years in the state penitentiary. The conviction was
overturned on technicalities, but the so-called reforms that allowed state
regulation of black businesses had done their worst, and Mitchell died in
poverty and some disgrace.
Basing her portrait on thorough primary research conducted over several
decades, Dr. Alexander brings Mitchell to life in all his complexity and
contradiction, a combative, resilient figure of protest and accommodation
who epitomizes the African American experience in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.

Gregg D. Kimball
Director of Publications
  and Educational Services
Library of Virginia
804/692-3722
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