It was the unrest in Ferguson that made Milton Mitchell want to leave the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County and come back home. “After the Mike Brown situation, my heart went out to this community,” Mitchell said. “I didn’t realize how much I love St. Louis until I saw it hurting.”
Mitchell, 37, landed a major position in St. Louis city as principal of City Academy, an independent elementary school co-founded in 1999 by Don Danforth III and Duncan Marshall at Mathews-Dickey Boy’s & Girl’s Club in North St. Louis (later moving across Penrose Street to its own pristine facility). But his home and family are much closer to the unrest.
His maternal grandparents, Jerlene Wilkes and Desoto Wilkes, live in Ferguson, which made the situation “super personal.” His parents, the Rev. Milton Mitchell Sr. and Cathy Mitchell, live in Berkeley, which would experience a police-involved killing and protest before their son could get back home. “They screamed,” he said, when they heard he was coming home to lead a school here.
Watching Ferguson from Los Angeles County, Mitchell said, “My heart always went out to the kids, what they were experiencing and going through. What are the babies experiencing, feeling, seeing?”
Many of the City Academy students he would come home to lead were directly impacted by the events in Ferguson, which spread to St. Louis. A slight majority of its students come from North County, from the Ferguson-Florissant (15 percent), Riverview Gardens (14 percent), Hazelwood (13 percent) and Normandy (9 percent) school districts, with the bulk of the rest (37 percent) coming from St. Louis. All of the school’s 188 students – uniquely among private elementary schools in Missouri – receive scholarship support.
“I felt I could make a difference, especially here, given City Academy’s intentional mission to take kids from the community I love dearly, no matter what barriers or obstacles, and propel them through to change their lives, families and, ultimately, communities,” Mitchell said. “Mr. Danforth established the mission and finds the resources, then lets educators do their job. It’s a pretty dynamic gig.”
Along with Alexis Wright, who started as head of school at New City School on the same day Mitchell started at City Academy, July 1, he is the first African American to lead a private, independent school in the St. Louis area.
Mitchell had not been at his new job a full week when Philando Castille, a St. Louis native, was killed by police during a routine traffic stop in a suburb of Minneapolis. Another wave of grief, anguish and rage swept through Black America, impacting the children, the babies.
“I sat in my office with the weight on me,” Mitchell said. “I didn’t realize how personal I would take my shepherding these kids.” His son, Benjamin Mitchell, 9, is one of the 188 students under his leadership. “That’s an added weight,” Mitchell said. (His daughter Lea Mitchell, 12, attends Immanuel Lutheran Day School in Olivette.)
He knows that City Academy students, overwhelmingly African-American, are successful by any standard. Ninety percent of its graduates have matriculated into the region’s most competitive private, independent secondary schools. Members of City Academy’s class of 2009 graduated from high school in 2015, and every single one of them was accepted to college, receiving significant financial support.
But that does not protect them from the police.
“You can be educated, do everything right, dress appropriately, drive a nice car, but get pulled over by a police officer and have things go not so well,” Mitchell said. “How do we encourage these kids, but at the same time prepare them for society’s ills? That’s the struggle that keeps me up at night.”
Mitchell himself grew up, safe and secure, in Kinloch, a community that has since been, he said, “flattened.” He went to elementary school at a Catholic school in Kinloch, Our Lady of the Angels, which was shuttered in 2002. The oldest black community incorporated in Missouri lost more than 80 percent of its population between 1990 and 2000, as a result of buyouts to expand the St. Louis airport. Mitchell, who was born in 1979, knew Kinloch on the cusp of the buyout.
“I knew every adult in my community, and they knew who I was,” Mitchell said. “I felt safe and protected. I was somebody.”
It helped that he grew up playing drums and saxophone in a neighborhood church founded by his grandfather, the Rev. John Mitchell Sr. It’s still there, St. John Missionary Baptist Church, now led by his aunt, Pastor Glenda Mitchell-Miles. His parents left Kinloch for Berkeley with their three children when Milton was 8. “Our house was the only inhabited house on our street for a good year,” he said.
Mitchell graduated from McCluer High School in 1997 and started what became a surprising family tradition by matriculating at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Mitchell was recruited when he visited campus at the invitation of a friend, Tracy Booth (now Dr. Tracy Heinz). The sight of flat corn fields dotted with ostrich and bison farms was all new to this son of majority-black ring suburbs, but a generous financial package helped him make the leap.
“There was a small number of students of color, but we bonded very quickly, and the university offered tremendous support,” Mitchell said. That was where he met his wife, now Angie Mitchell, and where his younger siblings followed him. His brother Michael Musician is music director for Leslie Odom Jr. (of “Hamilton” fame) in New York, and his sister Madeline Mitchell is associate director of Client Services for George Washington University in the nation’s capital.
Milton Mitchell was recruited to DePauw by a black man, Rod Haywood, then associate director of admissions, who then helped him land a job on campus in the admissions office after graduation. That set him on the path to his career. In 2001 he left his alma mater to work in admissions at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, near where his wife grew up in the Los Angeles area. He transferred to multicultural student services, then looked elsewhere when Cal Tech started to make cuts. “Minority programs are always the first to go,” he said. He held administrative positions at two independent K-12 schools in the Los Angeles area, the Buckley School and Chadwick School, before deciding he was needed more at home.
“It’s an immense blessing to be back home,” Mitchell said, “in a role that allows me to make a direct impact on a place I love so much.”
For more information on City Academy, 4175 N. Kingshighway Blvd., call 314-382-0085 or visit www.CityAcademySchool.org.
