When he ran for Congress in 1970, Parren J. Mitchell won the Democratic primary by 38 votes. By the time he retired from Congress in 1986, Mitchell was winning 90 percent of the votes. After a long decline, Mitchell died on Memorial Day in an intensive care unit in Baltimore. He was 85.
For many, Mitchell’s life and career were exemplary of the promises of the civil rights era. He was a decorated veteran, the University of Maryland’s first black graduate student, Maryland’s first black member of Congress and one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Right until the end, friends said, Mitchell was urging on the struggle for equality.
“I saw him a couple of months ago,” former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People President and U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume told The Associated Press. “And he grabbed me by the collar and said, ‘Never stop giving them hell.’ ”
Mitchell would spend most of his political career as a strong voice for equal rights. One of his first acts as a congressmanwas to boycott Richard Nixon’s speech with 11 other black congressmen. The group became the Congressional Black Caucus.
Born in Baltimore in 1922, Mitchell was the son of a waiter. The Mitchells would take center stage in the civil rights era. His brother, Clarence Mitchell Jr., was the NAACP’s chief lobbyist and was sometimes called “the 101st senator.” His sister-in-law, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, was a leader and legal counsel to the NAACP’s Maryland chapter.
In 1970, Mitchell challenged Samuel Friedel for Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. Friedel had held the seat since 1952, but Mitchell won the seat by 38 votes.
“A lot of people will be remembered for being the first,” U.S. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., told The Examiner. “Parren was a sophisticated, gifted legislator.”
One of Mitchell’s “lasting monuments,” Norton said, was a provision in an appropriations bill that required equal opportunity in government contracts. It remains in effect today, she said. He was one of the first congressmen to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. He spent most of the last six years of his congressional career organizing resistance to the Reagan administration’s attempt to roll back federal welfare programs.
After retiring from Congress, he ran for lieutenant governor of Maryland. His ticket was trounced in the primary.
