“No More “Fussin’ & Bussin’”: Rev. Henry Mitchell and Freedom From the Federal Government

In line with the 2025 Presidential Theme, this paper argues that Black Baptist minister and John Birch Society speaker, Rev. Henry Mitchell described freedom as “individual responsibility” and “less government,” over and against Dr. Martin Luther King’s calls for federal intervention. His vision of freedom reveals how Mitchell filtered Bircher conspiracy theories of communist infiltration of the federal government through a fundamentalist approach to the Bible that informed his politics of self-sufficiency, economic uplift, anti-communism, and nuclear family values. While not dissimilar to the ideologies of white conservatives, his values require further examination not only because of his affiliation with the John Birch Society but also because his politics reflected the lived experiences of marginalized Black Americans. Mitchell sat at an unexplored intersection of Black fundamentalism and reactionary conservatism which helps us explore the conservative movement in the United States and its relationship with Black communities.

In 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his peace march to Chicago, Illinois, hoping to quell “racial turmoil” in the city. Another reverend, Henry Mitchell, lived on Chicago’s west side, where he founded the North Star Missionary Baptist Church. On April 17, 1967, as King planned his Chicago march, Mitchell joined with two fellow Missionary Baptist ministers to hold a press conference. Across the front of the speaker’s podium, a banner was emblazoned with “What Can You Do to Bring Peace in Chicago.” Mitchell and his fellow ministers told King exactly what he could do to promote peace in Chicago: get the hell out! They had no interest in marches or King’s demands to the federal government—Mitchell said about King, “If he wants to march on the west side, let him march with rakes, brooms, and grass seed,” because Mitchell used jobs programs and economic opportunity to uplift his community rather than political protest (Congressional Record, 1968).

Using newspaper articles and the North Star Mission’s Star News newsletter, this paper explores Mitchell’s political work—starting with his remarks toward King in 1967 and ending with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980—to illuminate a strand of Black conservatism that meshed well with the broader American Conservative movement yet emerged from grassroots concerns within fundamentalist, Black communities. Rather than a simple act of historical inclusion, I explore Mitchell’s vision of freedom to illuminate the influence of race and racialization on conservative politics—which often goes unmarked and uninterrogated within a historiography that focuses largely on white conservative activists. 

By focusing on Mitchell, a Black American who believed the Civil Rights Movement was a communist plot to deprive Black Americans of their dignity, I show how expanding the scholarly focus on 20th-century conservatism to include Black voices like Mitchell's helps to nuance and enrich our understanding of religio-racial backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. After the collapse of Reconstruction, the failure of reparations, and a slow and stalling integration, the federal government had regularly abandoned Black communities and Mitchell’s political and economic solutions reflect that abandonment. Through Mitchell, we better understand what it was like to be a Black American in the mid-20th century and not see your freedom articulated in King’s methods of nonviolent protest or welfare programs run by the federal government. While Mitchell did not aim to reconcile his position with King’s, he effectively positioned King as an antagonist to his conservatism.

Scholars have shown that Black ministers like Elder Soloman Lightfoot Micheaux and J.H. Jackson openly opposed King and connected his efforts to the threats of communism, thus disrupting the traditionally white histories of anti-Civil Rights Movement activism. Scholars of conservative politics, including Leah Wright Rigeuer, effectively examine the role of Black conservatives in national politics, but they have not centered their studies around Black ministers. Thus, they have overlooked one of the historical anchors of Black life in the United States and failed to describe how conservative politics are often filtered to their communities through predominantly fundamentalist Christian language. Also, while Rigeuer’s work on Black Republicans offers much to my study, Mitchell does not fit into this story of the Republican Party because of his position as a grassroots activist and his affiliation with the John Birch Society, which placed him within the conservative fringe rather than mainstream conservatism. 

Mitchell’s speeches and articles in Star News described freedom from the federal government as essential to increased economic freedom, emphasizing self-sufficiency above all else. Mitchell believed that the Civil Rights Movement and the liberal federal government continued to propose “fussin’ & bussin’” policies with “no constructive, concrete ideas” to “assist the black community in achieving dignity, self-reliance, and personal esteem” (Kent Courtney, “Follow the North Star”). In response, Mitchell’s North Star Mission began jobs programs, high school finishing programs, and social events for teenagers in Chicago’s west side. In 1968, the Illinois state legislature passed a resolution commending the North Star Mission’s programs, congratulating Mitchell on his successful mobilization of “the clergy, the home owners, the social workers and businessmen of the community into an effective fighting force to combat the deadly cancer among the youth of our society” (House Resolution, State of Illinois, May 18, 1967).

Mitchell’s local programs and national activism offer a window into the life of a pastor whose on-the-ground programs in Chicago significantly benefited the local community and whose national politics put him in conversation with Phyllis Schlafly, George Wallace, and the John Birch Society. His activism provides further evidence that Micheaux and Jackson were not exceptions to the rule of white conservatism but were part of a larger network of Black conservative activists. 

Thus, this paper shows how Mitchell’s lived experiences as a Black American and as a fundamentalist minister offer a much-needed exploration of Black conservatism as an opportunity to detail different visions of freedom that nuance the history of the rise of the American Conservative movement.