Littleton Mitchell was a pioneer in the fight for equal treatment of all. Having seen a black man elected president, he has lived a dream.
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It was in this role that Mitchell found a way to right the injustices he had seen throughout his life. One of his first goals was to seek out the man who started it all.
“When we came back from down in the South, I told Jane, ‘I’m going to get with the NAACP in Wilmington,’ and my first thing that I wanted to do when I became president of the state branch was migrant labor. We’re going to look at migrant labor, and I want to find out about John Isaacs,” Mitchell recalls.
He discovered that Isaacs owned several farms in Delaware. He regularly used migrant laborers from Southern states to work his fields, and he forced them to live in squalid conditions. “We did a very good study on him and we got those places closed,” Mitchell says.
Such work continued throughout his tenure, whether it was mounting support to fight against the national Ku Klux Klan, holding a meeting in Dover or investigating segregation at hospitals in Lewes and Smyrna.
And now, having retired from his post at the NAACP in 1991, he has lived to see what he never thought was possible: an African-American president of the United States.
“I didn’t think this country had matured to the point where the majority of the people wouldn’t look at his complexion or his race,” he says. “I could not conceive of the people of this country coming out and voting for a very intelligent and very secure black man.”
But vote they did, and Barack Obama’s election to the highest office in the land is the direct result of the work Littleton Mitchell and so many others did during the hard days at the height of the civil rights movement, says Federal Judge Gregory Sleet, a close friend of Mitchell’s through his father, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Moneta Sleet Jr., who covered the civil rights movement for Ebony magazine.
“I think there’s probably a direct link with Lit to my existence here on this court and even to my previous position as U.S. attorney,” Sleet says. “He was laying the groundwork, along with many others like him, people who were laboring in the trenches to build what we see today in grand relief in the person of President Barack Obama, which is something I didn’t think I’d live to see.”
John Watson, morning host on WILM-AM, also notes the link between Mitchell and Obama. “He was able to do what we hear about Barack Obama so much—bridging the gap between the two races,” Watson says. “When I first started hearing about Barack Obama, I said, ‘Well, he reminds me of Littleton Mitchell.’”
So Mitchell, the matador who dedicated himself to fighting the beast that is racism, has lowered his cape and sword against a weakened foe. Today, it’s less about fighting, more about speaking to young people about why he fought and about why the pockets of racism, the tiny incidents that deny a job or wound the soul, should be brought into the open.
“For young people to have the ability to reach out and touch him and speak with him and have him tell those stories, it gives them context,” Sleet says. “How much better is that than reading it in a textbook, if you can even find it in a textbook?”