On December 14 in Manhattan, Charlene Mitchell passed away.
She was the first Black woman to run for president in 1968 as the Communist Party’s presidential candidate. She was 92.
Her son Steven Mitchell verified that she passed away at a nursing home.
Ms. Mitchell joined the Communist Party in 1946 at the age of 16, and during her lengthy career, she focused on issues like feminism, civil rights, police brutality, economic injustice, and anticolonialism that have come to characterize the left’s agenda over the past 50 years.
She gained party leadership during a precarious time. The McCarthy era’s restrictive policies had destroyed the Communist Party, which was later further weakened by the evacuation of disgruntled members following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
It had fallen from its peak of over 75,000 members in 1947 to just 10,000 by the late 1950s.
The party used its history of militant civil rights act as a recruiting tool to win over a new generation of Black leaders. In 1958, Ms. Mitchell became the youngest member of the party’s national committee.
Charlene Mitchell’s children: Who are Charlene Mitchell’s kids?
Charlene Mitchell’s son is Steven Mitchell. She established the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-Black chapter, in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and it swiftly rose to the top of the nation in terms of activity.
Che Guevara, an Argentine Marxist, and Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese leader, were chosen as the club’s namesakes to reflect Ms. Mitchell’s unwavering belief that the American left must be based in a global network of freedom battles.
