Born: March 8, 1911, Baltimore, MD

Education: Lincoln University (PA), B.A., 1932; University of Maryland Law School, LL.B. 1962

Died: March 18, 1984, Washington, DC

Director of the NAACP's Legislative Bureau in Washington, DC, Mitchell was its lobbyist on Capitol Hill. Known as “the 101st Senator of the United States,” he helped broker modern civil rights laws. After the passage of the Fair Housing Act (1968), the Congressional Quarterly Service stated that he “was the catalyst who organized and kept together the forces that passed the bill.”

He emerged during the post–World War II struggle against Jim Crow. As NAACP labor liaison, he founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (1950), including more than fifty civic, religious, and social organizations. While pursuing the conference's legislative priorities, he cultivated supporters in Congress, Democratic and Republican. A critical breakthrough came with the Civil Rights Act (1957). The first such law since 1875, it formed the US Commission on Civil Rights to advise and report to Congress and the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice to investigate or prosecute violations of civil liberties and rights. With segregated public accommodations and violent attacks on southern nonviolent activists rampant in the early 1960s, Mitchell lobbied tirelessly for protection. The Presidential Medal of Freedom (1980) honored him for helping to pass the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965).