A Carpetbagger in Reverse
A Carpetbagger in Reverse
Arthur W. Mitchell, America's First Black Democratic Congressman
A long overdue account of the pioneering life and work of controversial African American Congressman Arthur Wergs Mitchell of Chicago
A Carpetbagger in Reverse offers a landmark reassessment of the life, career, and accomplishments of groundbreaking Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, the first Black Democrat elected to Congress and the only Black member of Congress during his four terms of service from 1935 to 1943.
Born to former enslaved people in Alabama in 1883, Mitchell studied with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute and later moved to Washington DC and became a lawyer. He continued his career in Chicago, where the Great Migration had helped transform the city’s South Side into a vibrant, multiracial enclave.
As a congressman, Mitchell helped to create an enduring alliance between Black Americans and the Democratic party. Seeing his primary role as representing the South’s disempowered Black population, his belief that solutions to the region’s racial problems should arise from a new cadre of locally trained leaders brought him into frequent, vituperative conflict with the NAACP, the Republican Party, and the Black press. The first Black lawyer to argue successfully before the Supreme Court, his unanimous victory in Mitchell v. United States would have long-term consequences for the Civil Rights Movement.
A Carpetbagger in Reverse is the first publication significantly based on Mitchell’s papers, an essential and often overlooked source of insights about the development of Black political and culture life in the 1930s and 1940s.
A Carpetbagger in Reverse offers an engaging and well-written account of the life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell. . . . Knapp’s study offers a corrective account of Mitchell’s life and work that seeks to acknowledge this path-breaking Black politician’s many talents and accomplishments without ignoring his faults.’ —Mia Bay is author of the Bancroft Prize winning book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
John Morris Knapp is author of Behind the Diplomatic Curtain.
List of Illustrations
Prologue. “Everybody Knows the Character of the Negro”
Acknowledgments
Introduction. A Forgotten Man and His Unwanted Papers
Chapter 1. “The Place of My Birth, Which Is Very Dear to Me”
Chapter 2. “That Station in Life Where We Should Do Something for Ourselves”
Chapter 3. “He’s a Carpetbagger”
Chapter 4. “What a Difference a Week Makes”
Chapter 5. “A Political Abortion . . . Imprisoned in the Winds of Hate and Slander”
Chapter 6. “The Shame of American Democracy”
Chapter 7. “Not a Republican Dared Move”
Chapter 8. “The Top Expert Statistician of the Democratic Party”
Chapter 9. “The Most Potent Man in Congress”
Chapter 10. “The Greatest Statesman His Race Has Produced in a Century”
Chapter 11. “N______s Ride in Second Class”
Chapter 12. “The Negro Must Work Out His Destiny in the South”
Chapter 13. “Betrayers of the Public Trust”
Chapter 14. “Get Out of Congress as Early as Possible”
Chapter 15. “It Was My Privilege to See You in Action”
Chapter 16. “The Most Notable Decision Since Dred Scott”
Chapter 17. “What Is Democracy Anyway?”
Conclusion. “And So Goes on the Fight”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
