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

In 1967, Black Baptist minister Rev. Henry Mitchell told Dr. King to “get the hell out” of Chicago because he “created hate.” Mitchell had no interest in marches or King’s demands to the federal government. This paper argues that as a fundamentalist minister and John Birch Society speaker, Mitchell described freedom as “individual responsibility” and “less government,” over and against Dr. Martin Luther King’s calls for federal intervention. Mitchell's vision of freedom reveals how he filtered Bircher conspiracy 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. This paper shows how Mitchell sat at an unexplored intersection of Black fundamentalism and reactionary conservatism which offers new understandings of the American Conservative movement and its relationship with Black communities.