John W. Mitchell (1886-1955) was a pioneering Black Extension agent and educator.
Cooperative Extension at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University has a long history of graduating and employing some of the country’s most talented and influential African Americans. Black History Month 2021 provides an opportunity to look back on some of those trailblazing individuals.
John W. Mitchell was born in 1885 and graduated with a degree in agriculture from the Agricultural and Mechanical College for The Colored Race (now N.C. A&T) in 1909. In 1917, he became an Extension agent for Bladen, Columbus and Pasquotank counties, dedicated to improving living conditions for farm families by teaching agricultural best practices. The work was challenging back then; he commuted between counties on dirt roads by horse or bicycle, sometimes spending the night with farm families.
By 1924, Mitchell was directing Extension activities for 15 counties. He built one of the largest Negro 4-H Clubs in the nation and became the state agent in charge of Extension work for African Americans in North Carolina in 1940. Mitchell was well known for leading state and national agricultural conferences, for his financial and innovative leadership in the lives of the state’s African-American farmers, and for academic and community efforts between the races while serving on the North Carolina Commission on Inter-Racial Cooperation.
While at A&T Mitchell worked with many of the South’s greatest men and women of agriculture and vocational education, including Robert E. Jones, John D. Wray, Dazelle Foster Lowe, S. B. Simmons, and Dean John McLaughlin of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.
He left A&T in 1943 to join the United States Extension Service, representing 17 southeastern states. In 1953, USDA Secretary Ezra Taft Benson appointed him to the specially created post of National Extension Leader on the Division of the Department of Cooperative Extension Work. This was the highest rank ever given to a person of color within the national Extension organization. At one time Mitchell was seen as the nation’s most significant person of color in agriculture, second only to George Washington Carver.
Mitchell was still with the USDA when he passed away on January 8, 1955, at the age of 69. He is recognized as one of A&T’s most outstanding agriculture alumnus and was inducted into the N.C. A&T Agriculture Hall of Fame in 1996. John W. Mitchell Drive on A&T’s campus was dedicated in the 1975-76 academic year. In addition, during the 2014 centennial celebration for Cooperative Extension he was remembered as one of the key pioneers of Cooperative Extension at A&T.
But Mitchell was not the first African American Extension agent in North Carolina. That honor belongs to Neil Alexander Bailey, a 1908 A&T graduate who became an Extension agent in 1910. Bailey had been a public school teacher for 20 years before earning his degree from A&T – one of 18 awarded that year. Bailey worked in Guilford, Randolph and Rockingham counties. Just as many Extension positions today require a car, his required a horse and buggy. He was noted for his promotion of corn production, and he frequently wrote on this and other subjects.
Today, A&T is the largest Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in the nation. Extension at A&T has staff in half of North Carolina’s 100 counties and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Each year, the work of Extension at A&T impacts about a half million North Carolinians.