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| John G. Mitchell The Sons of Allen |
John G. Mitchell (b. March 24, 1827; d. March 23, 1900)
Education: Oberlin College (A.B.)
Occupation: minister, teacher.
John G. Mitchell was born in Salem, Indiana. His parents were in North Carolina, but otherwise nothing is known about them. His brother, Samuel T. Mitchell, was also an educator and served as principal of the Lincoln Institute (now University) in Missouri and president of Wilberforce University. John's were free persons of color as Indiana's state constitution outlawed slavery.
John first appears in historical records as a student at Oberlin College in 1853. He graduated from the college in 1857 and then stayed in Ohio. In 1860, he was living in Cincinnati and working as a schoolteacher. He served as principal of a grammar school.
In 1863, John became a founding faculty member of Wilberforce University. He first taught elementary English, but later served as the university's financial agent. He left Wilberforce in 1870. He first went to Macon, Georgia and worked as assistant postmaster. He likely moved there to participate in Reconstruction. The African American leader Henry McNeal Turner also moved there to work for the Freedmen's Bureau. In the town, he met the classicist William Sanders Scarborough. Scarborough was a native of Macon, and he left the south to attend Oberlin a few years later, possibly with encouragement from John.
John left Georgia for Mississippi in 1871 to to serve as a professor at the newly opened Alcorn University. He was hired as the professor of agricultural chemistry and mineralogy. He only stayed at the university as short time. He and Professor Blackburn left in the middle of 1873. They left shortly after an investigative legislative committee issued a report that was highly critical of how the university was being run.
John had returned to Ohio by 1880. He was living in the town of Xenia, near Wilberforce University, serving as an AME minister and working as a teacher. In Xenia, he was reunited with William Sanders Scarborough who had moved to the area to serve as Wilberforce's classics professor. John himself returned to teaching at Wilberforce for a year, from 1883 to 1884. Towards the end of this time, he was elected present of the university, but this decision provoked controversy, and the position instead went to his brother, Samuel.
John returned to Wilberforce a third time in 1891 and was elected as dean of the university's seminary (the Payne Theological Seminary) in 1893. W. E. B. Du Bois was hired at Wilberforce the year after John became dean. In a later article on his time at the university, he described John as one of the three "extraordinary figures" who made Wilberforce (the others being Daniel Payne and Benjamin Lee). He described John as follows:
John G. Mitchell, large, calm and placid, starved for thirty-seven years to make a real theological seminary here, living always serenely above the clouds, with a firm and unshakeable belief in a higher world and in its intimate causal relations with this earth
John served as dean of Wilberforce's seminary until his death in 1900.
Sources
1. "The State." Macon beacon. [Macon, Miss], July 22, 1871, Image 3.
2. Year: 1880; Census Place: Xenia, Greene, Ohio; Roll: 1019; Page: 400C; Enumeration District: 090
3. The National Archives in Washington D.C.; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29; Series Number: M653; Residence Date: 1860; Home in 1860: Cincinnati Ward 13, Hamilton, Ohio; Roll: M653_976; Page: 289; Family History Library Film: 803976
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