Charlene Mitchell

Her early civil rights activism included organizing, in 1943 at the age of 13, both Black and white teenagers in pickets and other actions at the Windsor Theatre in Chicago, which segregated Black customers in balconies, and also at a nearby segregated bowling alley. So began early a long career of unrelenting activism and persistence, most famously illustrated in the success of the campaign she helped lead to free Angela Davis, perhaps “one of the most impressive mass international campaigns of the 20th century.” In 1993, Charlene Mitchell attended the Foro de São Paulo in Havana as an observer from the CCDS. In 1994 she served as an official international observer of the first democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa and was an observer at the Congress of the South African Communist Party that year.