‘I’m a Black Communist woman’: Charlene Mitchell on running for the White House

Charlene Mitchell was nominated by the Communist Party USA as its presidential candidate on July 4, 1968. She was the first Black woman to be nominated for the presidency by any political party. | People's World Archives

This article is part of the People’s World 100th Anniversary Series.

In 1968, Charlene Mitchell (1930-2022) was nominated as the Communist Party USA’s candidate for President of the United States. She was the first Black woman to ever run for the presidency.

Today, another Black woman—Kamala Harris—is running for president on the Democratic ticket. Trump and the far-right MAGA movement are deploying all sorts of racist and sexist attacks in an attempt to mobilize white supremacist support and undermine her candidacy.

The article below appeared in World Magazine, a supplement to the Daily World newspaper, a predecessor of People’s World, on Oct. 5, 1968. It was reproduced from the Chicago Daily News, whose reporter Lynn Langway had interviewed Mitchell in the last weeks of the presidential campaign.

At the time, Mitchell and her running mate, Mike Zagarell, were drawing large crowds at rallies and speaking engagements around the country with a message focused on ending the war in Vietnam and the military draft, fighting racism at home, and nationalizing major sectors of the economy to benefit the working class.

In the interview, Mitchell talks about being a Black Communist woman running for the highest office in the land.

From the hustings to the hustings
By Lynn Langway
Chicago Daily News / Sept. 12, 1968 | World Magazine / Oct. 5, 1968

NEW YORK—The country’s leading lady Communist talks more motherhood than Marx­ism and believes in peanut butter, pi­nochle, and the PTA.

“I’ve been a PTA member since my son started school about 12 years ago, and I think it’s a pleasant, charitable organization,” says Mrs. Charlene Mitchell, who also has been a member of the Communist Party USA for 22 years and is its first presidential can­didate since 1940.

“I don’t expect to win, except by some wild, miraculous stretch of the imagination,” says the former Chicago bookkeeper, who says she is running on a triple-minority ticket: Black, Red, and female. It is a ticket that cannot be on the ballots in 37 states.

She does expect to stump most of the country with her 23-year-old run­ning mate, Michael Zagarell, whose age makes him constitutionally ineligible for the vice presidency.

Mrs. Mitchell has announced plans to be in Chicago Oct. 3, 4, and 5 for speaking engagements that are still be­ing arranged.

“We’re going everywhere, even the South, as symbols of the problems and the people in this country that the two major parties ignore—a Black woman representing the struggle against racism and for peace, and a draft-age man representing the struggles of students and draft resisters,” says the 38-year- old nominee.

Some old soapbox rhetoric surfaces as Mrs. Mitchell, smart and slim in “Afro” hairdo and yellow crepe shift dress, holds forth at the party’s headquarters in what once was a Manhattan town- house.

Lyndon Johnson (for whom she says she voted) is dismissed as a “servant of the boss class.” And she dutifully drags “the workers” and “idle rich” into nearly every other sentence.

But this mother of a 17-year-old son knows the audience has changed: “There are some young people, some Black militants, who think we’re irrele­vant, yes, but each new generation comes along and thinks it invented pro­gress, invented radicalism—until it learns better.

“Black Power, guaranteed income, open housing—they’ll learn, like I did, that we’ve been there before,” declares Mrs. Mitchell, who joined the party at 16 while growing up on the Near North Side, disturbed at the discrimination she saw against Negro veterans of World War II.

Son Steven, however, has not joined, and her husband, a die-cutter, has never been a member. “They were somewhat shocked when I got the nomination on July 7, but then we discussed it, and they were excited about the idea of my running,” she recalled.

Home is a white, six-room “Spanish stucco” house in Los Angeles, complete with lawn and avocado tree, in a neigh­borhood “40-percent black, 20-percent Asian, and 20-percent white, with the whites on the decline.

“Here, I’m content to live on peanut butter, which I figure is healthy and quick, but there I spend hours cooking.

“That’s my only claim to creativity—I can’t paint, can’t write, but I can cook with soul, and my son won’t even touch restaurant-made lasagna,” she said, copper earrings swinging just above her shoulders as she laughed.

Mrs. Mitchell insists that her politics have not caused her much personal unpleasantness. “Our neighbors don’t go in for Red-baiting, because they knew me as a mother before they knew me as a Communist, before any attacks came.

“When I went before HUAC in the McCarthy years, some of Steven’s class­mates did talk about it—but it was mostly to say, ‘Gee I saw your mother on television, and she sure gave them what for.’”

Commuting to the Coast when she can, Mrs. Mitchell has been living in Harlem while planking together a plat­form urging an end to the war, the draft, and military bases abroad; nationalization of the space and arma­ments industries; independence for Puerto Rico.

Now she will try the platform out on people, and says, “I’m apprehensive, but not physically afraid.

“It will be hardest to be accepted as Black—that’s how people still see things in this country. I’m a Black Communist woman, not a Communist Black woman.

“But I refuse to believe that, in the majority, even in the South, my fellow Americans are so anti-Black, so crazed that they would attempt to take my life. Some kook who thinks he’s super-patriotic might be waiting down there, but they’re everywhere, because of the system, and you can’t get rid of the vio­lence until you change the system.”

And Charlene Mitchell, third woman and first Black woman ever to run for the U. S. presidency, left the office where bars shattered the window’s sunlight, passed through two sets of electronically locked doors, and headed for the hustings.

Read more about Charlene Mitchell and the 1968 Communist campaign:

> First Black woman presidential candidate: The Communist Party’s Charlene Mitchell

> Charlene Mitchell: Honoring a committed life

> Disrupting anti-communist myths: Charlene Mitchell and the NAARPR

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CONTRIBUTOR

Special to People’s World

People’s World is a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. It provides news and analysis of, by, and for the labor and democratic movements to our readers across the country and around the world. People’s World traces its lineage to the Daily Worker newspaper, founded by communists, socialists, union members, and other activists in Chicago in 1924.