A Carpetbagger in Reverse

A Carpetbagger in Reverse: Arthur W. Mitchell, America’s First Black Democratic Congressman 

By John Morris Knapp 

The University of Alabama Press, 2024 

Paperback: $34.95 

Genre: Nonfiction, Political History 

Reviewed by Bill Plott 

 Fifty years from now, some of today’s biggest names in music, sports, and politics may surprisingly be hardly remembered. Indeed, as author John Morris Knapp says of this biography’s subject: “He has virtually disappeared from the national historical narrative, much like Communist officials out of favor in Stalin’s Soviet Union would vanish from photographs of those standing atop Lenin’s tomb during parades.” 

But Knapp has resurrected Arthur W. Mitchell from historical obscurity, presenting a detailed history of an enigmatic figure in American politics. His very election as the first African American elected to Congress as a Democrat should cement his place in history as a legitimate Black hero. But naysayers often painted him as “Uncle Tom Mitchell,” a self-serving toady, sucking up to white people and often indifferent to the real needs of his people.  

Perhaps there is some truth in both, and Knapp has presented an encompassing look at Mitchell’s conflicting history. He was an excellent orator, engaging enthusiastic audiences, but also an accomplished self-promoter from his early days as an educator to his later high-profile public servant life. Herein, author Knapp introduces the reader to a long-lost native Alabamian who attained admirable heights in government. 

Mitchell was born in the Stroud community in Chambers County in 1883. He later claimed that he and heavyweight champion boxer Joe Louis grew up in the same area, and their fathers were pals. After Mitchell’s father and two sisters died of dysentery, the family was destitute, in abject poverty. Sensing that education might be his only hope, he left home around 1901, saying that he walked 65 miles to Tuskegee, surviving on fruit he picked up along the way. He reached Tuskegee Institute with fifteen cents in his pocket. Although he was befriended by Tuskegee President Booker T. Washington and always considered himself to be a “Tuskegee Man,” his formative education came from Snow Hill Institute in Wilcox County, where he found a curriculum that exposed him to liberal arts as well as industrial training.  

He became a teacher, eventually founding his own school, the West Alabama Normal and Industrial Institute. Following a fire, he relocated his school to Sumter County, where he found promising white patronage that favored educating Black students. He founded another school in Butler in Choctaw County. His success likely contributed to the dichotomy of his image. He was the first Black person to own an automobile in Sumter County. He said it was a “highly valuable and visible symbol of conspicuous consumption,” a sign that Black people could achieve something more than laboring and sharecropping. That symbol did not sit well with many whites, however. 

To raise money for his schools, he made many forays to the North. These trips made him aware of the Great Migration of southern Black people searching for jobs in the industrial North and Midwest. He would come to consider the movement detrimental to those still living in the South.  

In Sumter County, he developed a relationship with an important white man. John McDuffie was solicitor general of the First Judicial Circuit and a rising star in state politics. When McDuffie was elected to Congress in 1918, Mitchell closed his school in Butler and followed his white friend to Washington. In a memoir, he said he drove from Alabama to Washington in his fine automobile, carrying a suitcase with $10,000 in cash. Remarkable fact or self-promotion? Such a journey by a Black man in 1919 seems highly unlikely. Yet, he had prospered as an educator, and in Washington, he was able to buy three apartment houses, which provided him with a steady income.  

The groundwork for his political career was perhaps laid early in his Washington residency. He was invited to testify before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in the fall of 1919. The nation’s railroads had been nationalized for the war effort in 1917. In 1919, Congress was considering a return to private ownership. Mitchell spoke against segregated rail travel, citing many instances of Black people being shunted to baggage cars and other indignities. 

After a decade in Washington, he moved to Chicago with the express purpose of getting elected to Congress from a district with a substantial Black population. He had decided that affiliation with the Democratic Party was the route Black people should take, and he was elected in 1934. He served four terms, retiring in 1943. 

One observer said Mitchell’s politics were fluid, enabling him to navigate the difficult path between powerful Southerners in Congress and the demands of his constituents for equality. Whatever his accomplishments, like others before and after, he was never able to get anti-lynching legislation through Congress. 

However, he carried a rail passenger discrimination case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, winning a partial victory that perhaps foretold of civil rights changes yet to come. And after the United States’ entry into World War II, he pushed for the admission of Black people to the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy. He was not successful with the Navy, but eight of his appointments at West Point graduated. 

An overriding goal for Mitchell was to slow the Great Migration, to encourage educated, skilled African Americans to return to the South and help uplift their fellows. It was an admirable goal but certainly one with little chance of success. What opportunities really awaited the brave souls who returned to Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia? Would they be given equal opportunity to rise to the level of their capabilities? Quite unlikely in the Jim Crow world. It was Michael J. “Hinky Dink” Kenna, a veteran of Chicago’s political wars, who called Mitchell a carpetbagger. To which author Knapp responds: “To be more accurate, Kenna should have called Mitchell a reverse carpetbagger, a man who moved north to accomplish something that was impossible in the South.” 

Starting as a teacher, Mitchell always felt that education would be the key to a more equitable world because it offered a by-the-bootstraps climb to a better life. After leaving Congress, he continued to push for civil rights, especially through education. “Our progress depends more on education than upon all other factors combined,” he told a conference of Black Alabama educators. 

Knapp’s scholarship is complemented by his very readable narrative style. His recounting of Mitchell’s formative years as an educator of African American children in Alabama’s Black Belt is, in many ways, more engaging than the more important political years. He supplemented long hours with Mitchell’s unpublished and often self-serving memoir with meticulous research into scores of other documents and resources. The result is a book that resurrects the life and career of a long-lost twentieth-century political and civil rights leader. It also brings to light a native Alabamian scarcely known to most people today. 

Bill Plott is a retired journalist and author of several books including The Negro Southern League, A Baseball History, 1920-1952 (McFarland, 2015) and Black Baseball’s Last Team Standing, The Birmingham Black Barons, 1919-1962 (McFarland, 2019).