Juanita E. Jackson to Join 

N.A.A.C.P. National Staff

Miss Juanita Elizabeth Jackson, of Baltimore, Maryland, will join the national office staff of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, September 15 [1935]. Her duties will include field work, especially among the youth division and junior branches and with church groups, both young people and adults.

Miss Jackson, despite her youth, has been active in national movements among young people for the past five years. She was born in Hot Springs, Ark., but grew up and was educated in the public schools of Baltimore. She was graduated from the Frederick Douglass high school there in 1927. She attended Morgan College, but received her B.S. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. She taught in the Baltimore schools and returned to the University of Pennsylvania last year and secured her M.A. degree in sociology in June, 1935.

For three summers she traveled  extensively through the South, Middle West and Far West for the Methodist Episcopal church. She is vice president of the National Council of Youth of the M.E. church, an organization composed of 18,000 Methodist youth groups. Perhaps Miss Jackson is best known as the founder and president of the City-Wide Young People's Forum of Baltimore, which holds meetings throughout the winter, regularly attracting audiences of 1,500 to 2,000 persons. 

Miss Jackson is a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, of the American Sociological society, the women's auxiliary of the Baltimore Urban League, and the executive committee of the Baltimore N.A.A.C.P. She was secretary of the interracial commission at the University of Pennsylvania and a member there of the Y.W.C.A. cabinet. In July of this year she was a scholarship student at the Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore college. She is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Keiffer A. Jackson, 1216 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore. 

Source: The Reflector (Charlottesville's Only Negro Weekly) Issue Number:109;Date: 09/31/1935 ; p. 1, c. 1  

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On September 7, 1938 she married Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. at Sharp Street Memorial Methodist Church. Clarence Mitchell II was a lobbyist for the NAACP in the '50s and in the '60s. He was often referred to as the 101st senator, Clarence and Juanita had four sons Clarence Mitchell III, Michael Bowen, Keiffer Jackson, and George Davis. An Avowed Freedom Fighter, has been active throughout her life promoting human and civil rights. When the University of Maryland was finally required to open its law school to Blacks in the 1940's, Mitchell was among the first to attend. She was both the first Black woman to attend the Law School and the first Black woman to practice law in Maryland.

Over the years, Mitchell fought discrimination in the courts. She served as counsel in suits to eliminate segregation in municipal recreation facilities, restaurants and public schools in Baltimore City and other jurisdictions in Maryland, namely, the desegregation of the Fort Smallwood Municipal Park Beach and the swimming pools in Baltimore. Mrs. Mitchell also advocated the prevention of mass searches of private homes without warrants, specifically the police action in the "Veney Raids" in Baltimore in the 1950s, enjoining the Baltimore City Police Commission from conducting such mass searches of private homes without warrants. She also championed Baltimore school desegregation, making Maryland the first southern state to integrate its school system after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

Mrs. Mitchell also taught in Baltimore high schools.  She was from 1935 to 1938 special assistant to Walter White and was the National Youth Director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).   In her earlier years, she traveled extensively throughout the U.S. for the Bureau of Negro Work and the Methodist church, speaking and teaching courses in race relations. Committed to teaching and inspiring Maryland youth, Mitchell founded the Baltimore City-Wide Young People's Forum in 1931, and the NAACP Youth Movement in 1935.  In 1942, she directed a march on Maryland's Capitol with 2,000 citizens as well as the first city-wide "Register and Vote" campaign.  The campaign resulted in 11,000 new voter registrations on the books.  In 1958, she directed the NAACP's "Register to Vote" campaign which resulted in over 20,000 new registrations.

Throughout the tumultuous years of the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and into the 80s, Juanita Mitchell manned the barricades, sometimes at the side of her sainted mother, Dr. Lillie Jackson, and at other times with her beloved husband, Clarence Mitchell, Jr. Later, she could be found leading her sons along the freedom trail. She was the president of the NAACP and she was really one of Thurgood Marshall's mentors. She got Thurgood Marshall to organize pickets to integrate stores in Baltimore. And, of course, she is also the mother of former Maryland Senator Clarence Mitchell and former Maryland Representative Michael Mitchell.

Juanita Jackson Mitchell emphasized the words "Mobilization! Legislation! Litigation! Education! The Ballot!" until rendered physically immobile by a stroke in the late 80s, Mrs. Mitchell pressed those themes upon all within the sound of her voice. Juanita Jackson Mitchell died in Baltimore of a heart attack and stroke in July 1992.

In 1985 she was elected to the first Baltimore City Hall of Fame for Women by the Baltimore City Commission for Women and given the Everett J. Waring Honor by the Law Society of Howard County. In 1987 she joined her mother Dr. Lillie Carroll Jackson, who had worked with Thurgood Marshall in the '30s, with her induction into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. The Maryland Women’s Bar Association with their first and only honorary membership honored her in 1990 and in 1991 the Monumental City Bar Association created the Juanita Jackson Mitchell Scholarship Fund.