Lion in the Lobby: Clarence Mitchell, Jr.'s Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws.

Lion in the Lobby: Clarence Mitchell, Jr.'s Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws. Revised Edition. By Denton L. Watson. (Lanham, Md., New York, and Oxford: University Press of America, Inc., c. 2002. Pp. xxxii, 885. $145.00, ISBN 0-7618-2211-9.)

Clarence Mitchell Jr. was one of the nation's most important yet often overlooked civil rights advocates. Mitchell was front and center in many civil rights struggles, from his days in the 1930s as a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American covering lynchings in Maryland to the late 1970s when he ended his long tenure as the director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau. In Lion in the Lobby: Clarence Mitchell, Jr.'s Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws, Denton L. Watson has provided a well-researched, highly detailed account of Mitchell's fight to advance and protect civil rights for African Americans.

Watson develops two central themes throughout his narrative. First, becoming a civil rights advocate and an effective lobbyist involved an evolutionary process. The biography covers Mitchell's early childhood growing up in Baltimore's unique racial climate, which consisted of a mix of institutionalized racism and varying degrees of racial and ethnic tolerance. Watson makes a convincing case that Mitchell's adolescent experiences and then his time as a reporter often working in hostile racial environments gave him the ability to discern opportunities for negotiation with people of diverse social and racial backgrounds. These skills made Mitchell an effective lobbyist as he pushed for institutionalizing the principles of the Fair Employment Practice Committee in the mid-1940s and sought to garner votes for the voting and civil rights acts of the mid-1960s--just to name a few of his hard-fought battles.

Watson argues that while other civil rights leaders waged the struggle for equality by raising the nation's consciousness about segregation and disfranchisement, Mitchell, as the honorary and unofficial "101st Senator," performed the vital task of working the halls of Congress to convince lawmakers to support reform (p. xiii). Watson also emphasizes Mitchell's unwavering belief in the sanctity of law and the weight of the Constitution. In the main narrative, Watson clearly demonstrates a point that he makes in the extended introduction: "[Mitchell] regarded the law as the best shield against racial oppression and the best weapon in the struggle for racial equality" (p. xiv).

Watson's biography of Mitchell also doubles as a history of the NAACP and its role in advocacy for civil rights in the mid-twentieth century. Watson, who edits The Papers of Clarence Mitchell, Jr., began working for the NAACP's public relations staff in 1971. Numerous interviews with Clarence Mitchell provide some of Watson's most interesting and illuminating source material. For the author, Mitchell and the NAACP were the driving forces behind the most lasting civil rights victories. This focus on the NAACP, however, is one of the book's few weaknesses because it downplays the contributions of other civil rights groups and leaders.

Watson's writing is mostly fluid, although there are a number of passages that are repetitive. With almost eight hundred pages of main text, there is ample material that probably could have been cut. A more thorough editing job would have improved an otherwise strong narrative and compelling story. Even though this is an especially laudatory treatment of Clarence Mitchell Jr., it remains a fundamental starting point for any student pursuing the study of his work, and it makes an important contribution to the overall history of the civil rights movement.

Salisbury University

CRESTON LONG