Politician Carried On A Civil Rights Legacy

It was a troubling initiation into a racist culture frustratingly familiar to African American residents of the almost-Southern city of Baltimore. It was a culture that the Mitchell family refused to accept.

Mitchell's brother, whom he called "my big brother hero," would become director of the Washington office of the NAACP from 1950 to 1979. His sister-in-law was a prominent civil rights lawyer in Baltimore.

At an early age, Mitchell was walking picket lines with his brother outside segregated department stores, theaters and an amusement park. He graduated from Baltimore's Frederick Douglass High School in 1940 and served in the Army during World War II. He was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds he suffered in Italy.

He received an undergraduate degree in 1950 from what would become Morgan State University and applied for admission to graduate school at the University of Maryland in College Park. The university president turned him down, ruling that it was "inadvisable" for blacks to attend College Park. He proposed that Mitchell attend a separate graduate program in Baltimore.

Mitchell sued and won, thus becoming the first African American graduate student at College Park. He received his master's degree in sociology in 1952.

He worked as a probation officer and head of Baltimore's antipoverty program before becoming an assistant professor of sociology at Morgan State, where he also directed the school's Urban Studies Institute.

He came to public prominence in 1968 when he helped mediate rioting that broke out in Baltimore after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. He ran for Congress in 1968 but lost in the Democratic primary.

He ran again in 1970, defeating a veteran incumbent by just 38 votes in the primary. Considered too liberal by some House colleagues and too blunt by others, he never lost his outrage on behalf of the poor and minorities.

In 1977, the minority set-aside programs he so proudly championed came under attack in Congress when it was revealed that many contracts that were supposed to be set aside for minority business owners were going to African Americans fronting for white contractors. In one hearing, Mitchell scathingly denounced "these white knaves and their black Judas Iscariots" for undermining the program.

In the mid-1980s, members of Mitchell's family besmirched the ideals in which he believed. Two nephews who were then state senators -- Clarence M. Mitchell III and his brother, Michael B. Mitchell -- were convicted in federal court in 1987 of accepting $50,000 from the Wedtech Corp. to obstruct a House Small Business Committee investigation of the Bronx-based defense contractor.

Although Mitchell headed the committee at the time, he was not implicated in the scandal. His nephews were sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison.

Mitchell retired after eight terms, expressing frustration with the Democratic Party that it was "trying to out-Republican the Republicans." Congress, he said, "has lost its sense of compassion" and was chipping away at the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement.

In 1986, he joined the Democratic gubernatorial ticket of Attorney General Stephen H. Sachs. Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer easily defeated Sachs in the primary.

In retirement, he continued to work three days a week on social and political issues and served as chairman of the nonprofit Minority Business Enterprise Legal Defense and Education Fund.

There are no immediate survivors.