One reads this obituary and sees the pattern. A nice then young person who recognized the rot and racism inside the American Dream joined the only political party in the late 1940s which was foursquare for African-American civil rights--the Communist Party. She came from a family which escaped the white southern American terror against African-Americans, and had a dad in what was one of the greatest unions of its time, the porter union. She then rose in the Communist Party ranks just as the Party was decimated--but note the article said at its height there were only 75,000 Communist Party members, so one wonders what the massive fear ever was. As those who know me know, Bill Buckley let the cat out of the political bag when he wrote (with his brother in law Brent Bozell) that the true purpose of the Red Scare was to defeat liberalism overall (see page 333 of "McCarthy and his Enemies" 1954).
But, despite all the challenges she faced as a leftist black woman in the 1950s and 1960s, Ms. Mitchell became fairly expert in organizing defenses of black women who were caught up in the criminal (in)justice system. She eventually split from the Party, as she obviously realized the Party was, again, too decimated--and also demonized to be of any continuing value.
If anyone wanted to say her life is ultimately a failure, that would be using the wrong historical lens. Her failure to be more politically successful is in the context of the triumph of fascist, reactionary, neoliberal, and general corporate elements in our politics. Charlene Mitchell represented a meaningful grass roots type of politics that, due to the structures of our political system, mostly only achieves success in the margins. Too many of us are either ignorant of how to recognize and see reforms of systems that repress regular folks, or are complicit in that system.
