A modern Pulitzer & a 19th century editor

The original opponent of the Robert E. Lee statue issued a stern prophesy after the monument was erected in 1890.  John Mitchell Jr. — newspaper editor, politician, banker and civil rights activist — predicted that the monument “will ultimately result in handing down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and blood.”  

John Mitchell, Jr., was editor of the Richmond Planet from 1884 – 1925.   A resident of Richmond, Va.’s  Jackson Ward area, Mitchell was born into slavery in 1863, but his family was freed when Union troops liberated the city in April 1865.

Beginning in December, 1884, Mitchell started reporting on injustice and lynchings. For example, he reported on a lynching in Smithville,  Charlotte county, Virginia in May, 1886. Afterwards, someone sent Mitchell a rope with a note attached to it, warning that he would also be lynched if he ever set foot in Smithville. He responded with a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

“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.”

Afterwards, armed with two Smith & Wesson pistols, Michell took a train to   Smithville and walked  five miles from the station to see the site of the hanging.

Covering another lynching in 1898, Mitchell wrote this headline:  “They Lynched Him;  A Colored Man Dealt With – Taken From the Train; Died Protesting Innocence;  A Brutal Murder – Mob Makes No Effort At Disguise.” 

The fact that Mitchell even survived as an editor in Richmond for 40 years was in itself unusual.  Many editors, especially Ida B. Wells of Memphis, TN and Alexander Manly of Wilmington, NC,  were driven out of the South. The modest  success of most of the black press was short-lived after the Reconstruction era gave way to a period of severe, violent  repression, the wide extent of which is still mostly unknown and largely unacknowledged.

What will replace the Lee statute?  Williams had this idea: