MY FATHER’S FAMILY TREE HAS A CAPT. CHARLES L. MITCHELL, BORN in my hometown of Hartford, Conn., who took what he learned during what was later described as a “relatively brief tenure at that city’s venerable Courant” to establish a Black-oriented newspaper, also called the Courant, in his adopted city of Boston in the late 19th century. On my mother’s side of the family, there was, most notably, my uncle C. Sumner “Chuck” Stone Jr., who was at various times in the 1950s and ’60s editor of The New York Age, The Washington Afro-American, and The Chicago Defender—all before his 18-year run as a columnist, political gadfly, go-between for law enforcement and Black suspects, and senior editor at the Philadelphia Daily News. Scrolling recently through old copies of the Age,…
