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Biography

Stanley Mitchell is the grandson of some of the founders of Third Baptist Church in Davenport, IA. He was born in 1929 and is being interviewed by students from PCI’s Project HOPE. He has a powerful story including the importance of the church in daily life, the wonder of prayer when his father prayed, and the impact of music. He speaks of the Depression, the Klan, segregation, and how his sister stood up to racism. His story is so enthralling that the adults started asking questions as well.

Transcript

Q: What is your name?

Stanley Mitchell: My name is Stanley Mitchell.

Q: Where were you born?

Stanley Mitchell: I was born here in Davenport, Iowa, in 1929.

Q: Who were your parents?

Stanley Mitchell: My parents was Annabelle Mitchell and Abraham Mitchell.

Q: Do you have any sisters or brothers?

Stanley Mitchell: Ah yes, I had one sister, she is deceased. Her name was Dorothy (Doris?)____.

Q: Your family became founders of Third Baptist, can you tell me something about them?

Stanley Mitchell: Ah, yes. As a matter of fact I can. My fore parents, going back to my grandfather’s day, they helped found Third Baptist Church. There was William Hart, who was my grandfather. Milton Howard, which was a great uncle of mine, course he was related by marriage, and Kate Hart was William Hart’s wife, which was my grandma.

Q: Where did they live?

Stanley Mitchell: That I don’t know.

Q: Where did they work?

Stanley Mitchell: Where did they work?

Q: Where did they work?

Stanley Mitchell: I don’t know. I never knew my grandparents. They were all dead by the time I was born.

Q: Okay. When your parents were young, do you know where they lived?

Stanley Mitchell: Yea, they lived here in Davenport. My grandmother and grandpa William they got married when they lived in Rock Island, but they moved to Davenport and they lived over here for 35-40 years. A good 30 years I know. They lived here in Davenport. And that’s where I would always go of course.

Q: Do you know what your parents did for work?

Stanley Mitchell: My sister did housework. My mother didn’t work. She was a housewife… My father was one of the head deacons in the church and I tell you what, Abraham was known for praying. Everybody loved to hear him pray and my sister, she was known for doing things like giving plays, giving readings, poetry, and generally helping out with educational things. As a matter of fact, she taught Sunday School for a good many years before she passed away. My mother was known for working with choir. Everybody said my mom had the most beautiful voice they ever heard. She was a singer. She did that until she couldn’t, she got so old she couldn’t come back to church anymore too much. But, she was known for her singing ability and choir. As for me, I remember when the church used to give hayrides. They don’t do things like that anymore, but they’d give a hayride which consisted of somebody’s truck and they’d go and get bales of hay, they’d get bales of hay and load that truck down and sometimes they even pulled an old country wagon behind it full of hay, and everybody would get in that thing and have a ball. And people liked to have me in the programs. Well, me being a kid, I thought that was a big deal, you know, playing. Everybody wanted me to play music. I don’t play any music anymore and I haven’t played any music in a long, long many years now and I’ve forgotten most of whatever I knew, but in those days everybody wanted me to play music. I used to play guitar, played violin, and I played piano. As I said, it wouldn’t be any good at that anymore, because I’ve been away from music so long, I’ve forgotten most of what I knew because I haven’t even... But beyond that, I don’t remember too much about what went on in this church. I was very young and all the black people that were Baptists, as far as I know, they all came to Third Baptist. For the simple reason I can tell you that there were a lot of prejudice in this town. There was a time when the Klan was very active here in Davenport, and it didn’t take but a, just a hair to start trouble. If you were black, get in the back. And, not to get off on racial issues, but I could tell you a lot of stories about things that happened with the Klan. For example, they had an ice cream parlor and you could not go into it, as a matter of fact, they had two of them, right down on Harrison Street, on 12th and Harrison. One you could go in and take your ice cream out. The other one you couldn’t even get in because they did not allow black people to step their foot in the premises. Well, the NAACP got together and they promptly broke that up and there was a lot of fear here in this town. They thought it was going to lead to riots because the Klan didn’t like that at all. But the NAACP prevailed and you could finally go where ever we wanted to. There was only one ice cream parlor in town where you could go, it never was prejudice and that was a place called Iowana Dairy. You could go up there and sit down and have all the ice cream you wanted, but, no place else…. On thirteenth and_____ and up there on Fifteenth, too. But that’s the church I was baptized in. I never even knew there was River Baptism, I’ve heard of it, but I never even saw it. It must have been pretty good times for my church, because that church was in business when was I born, that was 1929, so that River Baptism had to be way before my time.

Q: What was going on back when you were a little boy about 1929? The stock market had just crashed. What was the depression like here in Davenport?

Stanley Mitchell: There was a big depression in Davenport. Everybody was on welfare. ____. I remember, well there was one building here now, down on Third Street, it was called the visiting nurses building. Everybody was on welfare, except those people which was oh maybe no more than four of five different families that were well enough off, that was not on welfare. But everybody was on welfare. In 1929, I grew up in that, that’s all I remember.

Q: How did your church keeping running if there wasn’t other than five families, your church, how did you keep going? Because you know, a lot of times you had your pay your pastor’s salary and things like that. How did you do that during that time?

Stanley Mitchell: Ah, I remember that they always took up collections in church for the pastor’s salary. I remember the choir and the programs he gave. From time to time, there were other churches came by from out of town and, oh, they came from all over. Some came from as far away as Chicago. They’d have programs here and I remember the revivals they had. They were very inspirational revivals. Everybody from all over, irregardless of what church you went to they came to Third Baptist for the preaching. They had some good preachers in those days… Revivals, and the first minister that I ever knew was, he went by the name of Hunter, B. H. Hunter. I grew up around him and finally he left and went to another church, but he was the first pastor that I ever knew at Third Baptist and he was a preacher, really preached, as people would say, he turned the church out. He was a very inspirational speaker. My fore parents, along with some other people helped to found Third Baptist. There was the Hart family, that was my grandparents, and then there was uncles and brothers on my mother’s side that helped to found Third Baptist. This was even before she got married, before my mother got married. She was just a young girl. These men were all southern men. My grandfather came from Memphis, Tennessee, and one of my uncles, Milton Howard, he is a uncle by marriage, he was kidnapped by some white people and taken back down south where they forced him to work as a slave and finally he broke out of there and came back to Davenport. And was very happy in the church and he finally wound up as one of the head deacons. My father, as I said before, was known for praying. They loved to hear that man pray. When Abe Mitchell prayed, you could hear a pin fall. Absolutely everything was dead quiet. I remember so well when he’d pray, he had a way of taking a handkerchief, like a ____, he’d spread it out on the floor before he’d kneel down. I suppose that was in order to keep his trousers clean. That’s what he would do. Everybody knew; people used to laugh, because he’d take that handkerchief, put it down, smooth it out, and then he get down and get ready to pray. But, when he got down to pray, everybody fell up and listened. It was really an experience to hear my dad pray. I remember when he was with my mom; my mother would get more requests to sing solos than she could possibly answer. Everybody loved to hear her sing. I mean, my mother had a singing voice that, to me, I have only heard maybe one or two other women sing like that. It was really something to hear her sing and, as I said before, she sang until she got too elderly. She couldn’t sing any more. But, she could sing.

Q: …ice cream socials and…

Stanley Mitchell: Well, the church was more or less the center of activity because, as I said before, here in Davenport there was some prejudice. Now, there wasn’t too many places you could go and things to do. I mean even to the point where they, it was so bad here where black people were forced to walk on certain sides of the street. Like down on 8th Street, they had a place down there, it was called Rachel (?) Apartments, which was a lot of well-to-do white people that lived there. And you could not walk on their side of the street. If you did, you were taking the chance on going to jail, because they would call the police. They had a meat market here, right down there around the corner on Harrison, called Rayburns (?), and my sister and I we got to the point we wouldn’t go there because she was “girl” and I was “boy”. Well, I was so young, I was just a little kid, too, I didn’t know. Didn’t make no difference what they called me. But she knew, my sister knew. She had a couple run-ins down there. Because they wanted to call her a girl. She wasn’t no girl. She was a woman and you don’t call a woman a girl. So we quit going down there. We started going to a fella up here on the Hilltop____. They tried it out there with her one time and she put the guy in his place right quick. And she never had any more trouble after that, but we didn’t go back to the ____ place anymore. We _____. I witnessed a few things during the time when I was growing up here and going to the Third Baptist Church; I’ve seen a few things.

Q: Could you tell us about where sit-ins and the Klan in Davenport?

Stanley Mitchell: What?

Q: Can you tell us about the worst the Klan incident in Davenport?

Stanley Mitchell: The what, the worst? From what I can gather and what I remember, these things were going on, I was, well there was some problems a fair amount of times. But as far as anyone being injured or killed, no. That never happened, but they would burn a cross.

Q: Ever burn in your yard?

Stanley Mitchell: Pardon me?

Q: Ever burn in your family’s yard or anything?

Stanley Mitchell: No. They never burned any crosses around my family home. I only know what I have heard, this is like second hand. I have heard of cross burning, but it was a case of as long as, as they would say, we stayed in our place, but if we started visiting out like trying to go where white people go today, as it is today, then we were in for a cross burning.

Q: It’s amazing that you’re talking about this because you lived in the north. Davenport is considered the north and we didn’t think that things like that happened like that where we live today in Iowa.

Stanley Mitchell: I tell you what, they had a saying here in Davenport; they had a saying here in Davenport. You’re living up north down south. I remember that very well. You’re living up north down south. Never let anybody say that it was easy living up here or that things was as they are now, even anywhere near it, because nothing could be farther from the truth.

Q: What school did you go to?

Stanley Mitchell: I went to…Taylor School, was my first one. From there I went to JB [Young] and from there I went to Central. Though in those days we didn’t call it Central, it was Davenport High. But those are the three schools I went to. After they shut Taylor School down, I went to Jefferson until I was in the sixth grade. It was then just as it is now. But I, for some reason, never had any trouble, racially, in these schools. Wasn’t any fights like the kids get into and things like that. I did have fights, but as far as any racial problems, I didn’t have any.

Q: Were you the only black in your class?

Stanley Mitchell: Oh no. There were other black people in the school. Yea, plenty.

Q: Did the black people in Davenport have a place where they lived? Now, I can remember at one point in time, blacks could not live north of Locust Street.

Stanley Mitchell: That’s true.

Q: That was still true in your time too.

Stanley Mitchell: Yea, that was true. And besides, if you lived north of Locust Street in those days, it was mostly cornfields. It was. Looking at Davenport today and looking at Davenport then, it’s like looking at Chicago. There was nothing out here, nothing but nothing and cornfields. But from what little distance that black people could live, was mostly on the east side. There wasn’t too many black families living on the west side.