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many radio talks. We had a few radio talks. Dr. Neistadt, this dentist, was
industrious in corralling funds for us as best he could. The newspapers gave
us pretty good coverage when we had formal meetings.

But my most vivid recollection of that campaign is with Frank Trager.
We would go out on a street corner in Baltimore and stand on a soap box.
Actually. And there were clanging street cars, and trucks, and all kinds of
things. We'd get under an arc light and try to collect a little crowd around
us. I remember vividly the thing that always got a response from a crowd -
not that was vocal, but you could see in their faces in the arc light that they
thought it was true. We said to them, "Very few of you who are 50 years of
age or over and unemployed will ever work again." Maybe it was an
exaggeration, but, by golly, you could see it struck home.

Interviewer: That gubernatorial campaign was your only venture into
politics?

Mitchell: Yes. And it wasn't politics. It was an educational propaganda
thing.*

And in February 1987, Juanita Jackson Mitchell was interviewed in her
home in northwest Baltimore:

Juanita Jackson Mitchell: The Communists courted us, but the Quakers
were also fighting for our support and our minds. There was a Miss
Elisabeth Oilman, who was the daughter of the first president of Johns
Hopkins University.

Interviewer: I've read about her, yes.

Juanita Jackson Mitchell: And Elisabeth Oilman was a Socialist, and she
would always have in her big beautiful home on Cathedral Street not too
many blocks from here ~ the 300 block of Cathedral Street — she would
have a forum at which she invited Norman Thomas and all the Socialist
leaders. They fell in love with Clarence Mitchell. This is something that is
not known. They had him come, and I went with him to the meetings, some
of the meetings. And they persuaded him to get on the Socialist ticket in
1934.

He ran for the legislature. The City-Wide Young People's Forum
was his campaign committee. We even got a little headquarters up here in
the 1600 block of Druid Hill Avenue. His platform was trying to get a state
ami-lynching bill and to support the Costigan-Wagner federal ami-lynching
bill, and to open up the University of Maryland and all state institutions to
the admission of Blacks. And jobs in the job market - equal opportunity in
the job market.

So he ran. Of course he didn't win. It was quite an experience.