John Mitchell, Jr. (July 11, 1863, to December 3, 1929) was an African American businessman, politician, and newspaper editor.
Mitchell was a civic leader and civil rights activist in Richmond, Virginia’s Jackson Ward community, a neighborhood of free African Americans and freed slaves which became known as the “Black Wall Street of America.”
He was a long-time editor of the Richmond Planet, an African American newspaper. "it was under his tenure that the Planet gained its well-deserved reputation as a proponent of racial equality and of rights for the African-American community."[1]
Resulting from his fearless reportage and campaign against racist lynching,
Mitchell himself was threatened with hanging at the hands of a Charlotte County mob angered by his reporting of the lynching, there, of Richard Walker in May 1886. Mitchell was sent a rope with a note attached warning him that he would be lynched himself if he ever set foot in the county. In reply, and borrowing a line from Shakespeare, Mitchell had this to say : “There are no terrors, Cassius, in your threats, for I am so strong in honesty that they pass by me like the idle wind, which I respect not.” Then, armed with two Smith and Wesson pistols, he boarded a train for Smithville, and undeterred, walked the five miles from the station to the site of the hanging. [Maurice Duke and Daniel P. Jordan, eds., A Richmond Reader: 1733-1983, (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983), 327-328][2]
Mitchell was also the founder and president of the Mechanics Savings Bank.[3] In 1921, Mitchell ran unsuccessfully to become Governor of Virginia. He is the subject of an extensive exhibit at the Library of Virginia.
In 1904, Mitchell organized a boycott of Richmond’s segregated trolleys which resulted in penalties to white passengers[4] and sent the streetcar company into receivership when it persisted with its Jim Crow policy.[5]
He is buried in an unmarked grave in Richmond’s Evergreen Cemetery.