Although he has largely receded from the public consciousness, John Mitchell Jr., theeditor and publisher of the Richmond Planet, was well known to many black, and not a few white,Americans in his day. A contemporary of Booker T. Washington, Mitchell contrasted sharply withWashington in temperament. In his career as an editor, politician, and businessman, Mitchellfollowed the trajectory of optimism, bitter disappointment, and retrenchment that characterizedAfrican American life in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow South. Best known forhis crusade against lynching in the 1880s, Mitchell was also involved in a number of civil rightscrusades that seem more contemporary to the 1950s and 1960s than the turn of that century. He led aboycott against segregated streetcars in 1904 and fought residential segregation in Richmond in1911. His political career included eight years on the Richmond city council, which ended withdisenfranchisement in 1896.As Jim Crow strengthened its hold on the South,Mitchell, like many African American leaders, turned to creating strong financial institutionswithin the black community. He became a bank president and urged Planet readers to comportthemselves as gentlemen, but a year after he ran for governor in 1921, Mitchell's fortunes suffereda drastic reversal. His bank failed, and he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years inthe state penitentiary. The conviction was overturned on technicalities, but the so-calledreforms that allowed state regulation of black businesses had done their worst, and Mitchell died inpoverty and some disgrace.Basing her portrait on thorough primary researchconducted over several decades, Ann Field Alexander brings Mitchell to life in all his complexityand contradiction, a combative, resilient figure of protest and accommodation who epitomizes theAfrican American experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.