Beaufort County civil rights leader, among first Black school board members in SC, dies
The memory of an encounter with Martin Luther King Jr. forever remained in the heart of a Beaufort County civil rights leader and activist who fought for childcare and integrated the county’s school board.
Frieda Mitchell recalled meeting King during one of his visits to Penn Center on St. Helena Island. She asked King how he could tell her to love people who treated her as less than human.
“He said we are created in God’s image,” Mitchell told The New York Times. “So you love the image of God in that person...I don’t know if I was able to use that, to apply that, in all different situations. But I always remembered it.”
Mitchell, a Sheldon native who lived most of her life in Beaufort County, died Oct. 15 at age 95. She was a groundbreaking activist who worked to integrate Beaufort County schools, becoming among the first Black school board members in the state. She helped organize and led an organization that promoted community child care centers throughout the state and advocated for the needs of rural areas.
A private burial service will be held in Beaufort on Wednesday. The family plans to establish a scholarship in Mitchell’s name and a community-wide celebration next year, her obituary said.
U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-Columbia, called Mitchell a mentor who led him to focus his work on rural issues.
“I don’t know if you can point to any one thing; she was in the background of so much,” said Clyburn, who served with Mitchell on the Penn Center board.
A daughter of Sheldon farmers, Mitchell earned perfect grades at Mather School and studied for two years at Allen University. Back in Beaufort County, she rallied residents in Sheldon to register to vote. The effort helped unseat a longtime magistrate judge and elect the first Black member of Beaufort County Council.
She worked as a secretary at Penn Center with its first director, Courtney Siceloff, and would have been involved in King’s retreats to the campus as he planned civil rights campaigns.
As Beaufort County pushed toward integrated schools, Mitchell was among those on the front line. She organized and chaired a group leading desegregation efforts in Beaufort County and, in 1968, along with Agnes Sherman, became the among the first Black school board members in the state when she was elected from the Sheldon township.
Mitchell would remain on the school board for 16 years. The position elevated her voice, she recalled in the book “Champions of Human and Civil Rights in South Carolina.”
“I think one thing that we accomplished was the ability or the opportunity to speak and to be heard, because prior to that, blacks were just...we were not even given the opportunity in public meetings to express our concerns,” Mitchell said in an interview for the book. “But in an open forum like that, and we were elected so we had all the same rights and privileges that our white counterparts (had), and that within itself gave us the opportunity to express ourselves and they couldn’t shut us up.”
Mitchell recalled learning that board policy allowed two members to call a meeting, and she and Sherman hosted the board of education at an all-Black school with a standing-room crowd of families who “wanted to be reassured there wasn’t going to be a bloody riot and their kids get killed,” Mitchell said in the book.
“Even though there was a lot of tension, there was a lot of hatred, that didn’t matter,” said Joseph McDomick, a St. Helena resident who worked with Mitchell at Penn Center. “We knew that people had to stand up, and she was certainly one of those who stood up.”
Mitchell and other school members once went to jail because of their activism, said Thomas Barnwell, who worked with Mitchell at Penn Center.
Mitchell saw her life’s work as shaping children, and she brought together numerous organizations to form the United Communities for Child Development. The organization allowed for state and federal resources to support childcare programs throughout the state, and the program was quickly replicated in neighboring states.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation asked Mitchell to share her ideas during a tour of southern Africa, and she became a leader on childcare policy.
In 1996, U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings helped secure $500,000 to build a childcare facility on St. Helena Island named for Mitchell.
“The community as a whole will never have the opportunity of finding a person who was so committed, so dedicated and so willing to sacrifice herself...as Frieda Mitchell,” Barnwell said.
