On December 14 in Manhattan, Charlene Mitchell passed away. She was the first Black woman to run for president in 1968 as the Communist Party's presidential candidate. She was 92.
Her son Steven Mitchell verified that she passed away at a nursing facility.
At the age of 16, Ms Mitchell joined the Communist Party. Throughout her lengthy career, she campaigned on issues like feminism, civil rights, police brutality, economic injustice, and anti-colonialism that have come to characterize the left's agenda over the last 50 years.
She gained party leadership during a precarious time. The McCarthy era's restrictive policies had destroyed the Communist Party, which was later further weakened by the evacuation of disgruntled members following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
It had fallen from its peak of over 75,000 members in 1947 to just 10,000 by the late 1950s.
The party used its history of militant civil rights act as a recruiting tool to win over a new generation of Black leaders.
In 1958, Ms Mitchell became the youngest member of the party's national committee.
She established the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-Black chapter, in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and it swiftly rose to the top of the nation in terms of activity.
Che Guevara, an Argentine Marxist, and Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese politician, were chosen as the club's namesakes to reflect Ms Mitchell's unwavering belief that the American left must be based in a global network of freedom battles.
She visited many places, connecting with other lefties in Europe, South America, and Africa.
She was one of the first Americans to draw attention to Nelson Mandela's situation and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
She was one of the most well-known and well-liked American Communist leaders by 1968.
"I don’t know of anything that Charlene was involved in where she was not the leader," Mildred Williamson, who met Ms Mitchell at a 1973 anti-apartheid conference in Chicago, said in a phone interview.
Ms Mitchell became the Communist Party's presidential nominee when she was just 38.
At its convention in Manhattan, she accepted the nomination below a banner that read "Black and White Unite to Fight Racism — Poverty — War!"
"We plan to put an open-occupancy sign on the White House lawn," she declared and, taking a swipe at the pet project of the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, added, "We propose to put a woman in that house to beautify not only our highways but to beautify ourselves."
Four years before Shirley Chisholm, a congresswoman from New York became the first Black woman to run for president in a major party, she ran for office.
Her candidacy gave the Communist Party a new face at a time when the student-led New Left was gaining ground in left-wing politics and some party members had grown weary of its uncritical support of the Soviet Union, even though she and her running mate, Michael Zagarell, appeared on just four state ballots and received just over 1,000 votes.
She provided a vision of the left that was based on the experience of working-class women of colour, in contrast to the student movement, which was primarily male, middle-class, and white.
An assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles called Angela Davis was one of her adherents.
Ms Mitchell served as the head of Dr Davis' defence team after she was detained in 1970 on suspicion of giving the killers of a Marin County judge the weapons they needed.
In response to Dr Davis's acquittal in 1972, Ms Mitchell founded the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an organization that anticipated subsequent racial justice movements by focusing on police violence and the judicial system.
"Black Lives Matter and modern Black feminism stand on the shoulders of Charlene Mitchell," Erik S. McDuffie, a professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois, said in a phone interview.
One of Ms Mitchell's many successful efforts was the acquittal of Joan Little, a prisoner from North Carolina who was charged with killing a guard after engaging in sexual misconduct.
Also in North Carolina, she advocated on behalf of the Wilmington 10, a group of nine Black men and one White woman who were acquitted of conspiracy and arson charges in 1971.
"I don’t think I have ever known someone as consistent in her values, as collective in her outlook on life, as firm in her trajectory as a freedom fighter," Dr Davis said at a 2009 event honouring Ms Mitchell.
On June 8th, 1930, Charlene Alexander was born in Cincinnati. Her father, Charles, was from Georgia, and her mother, Naomi (Taylor) Alexander, was from Tennessee.
They both travelled north as part of the Great Migration of Black Southerners in the early 20th century.
She divorced both Bill Mitchell and Michael Welch after their weddings. She leaves behind her kid and two brothers, Mike Wolfson and Deacon Alexander.
Charlene, her parents, and her seven siblings relocated to Chicago when she was 9 years old, where her father worked as a hod carrier and Pullman porter.
A precinct captain for Representative William L. Dawson, one of the few Black members of Congress, he was also involved in the labour movement.
The family moved into Cabrini Homes, a public housing complex for people of many races on Chicago's Near North Side, which served as a hotbed of left-wing politics.
When Charlene was 13 years old, she joined the local American Youth for Democracy chapter, the Communist Party's youth wing.
She participated in organizing a demonstration against the Windsor Theater, a neighbouring venue that compelled Black clients to sit in the balcony, in the early 1940s.
One day, white and black students attending a matinée simply exchanged seats, and the theatre quickly abandoned its segregation policy.
Ms Mitchell attended Chicago's Herzl Junior College for a brief time (now Malcolm X College).
She relocated to New York City in 1968 after moving to Los Angeles in the early 1950s.
Despite Ms Mitchell's continued commitment to socialism, the Communist Party lost her support in the 1980s, particularly with the passing of Henry Winston, the party's most senior Black leader, in 1986.
She eventually came to the conclusion that the party was concentrating too much on class concerns at the expense of addressing racial and other injustices.
"I am not suggesting that all of a sudden there was racism in the party, or that some people were mean, or anything like that," she said in a 1993 interview.
"You had a situation where attention to certain questions that African American comrades felt were important was downgraded."
Ms Mitchell joined more than 100 other party members in urging the party to abandon Leninism and follow a more democratic socialist course following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Gus Hall, the party's longstanding general secretary, expelled them from following national committee meetings in reprisal.
Later, Ms Mitchell left the party to work on establishing the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an effort to restructure the left along more inclusive lines.
However, she remained devoted to the ideals of the far left and communism as she saw them.
"The country’s rulers want to keep Black and white working people apart," she said in a 1968 campaign speech.
"The Communist Party is dedicated to the idea that — whatever the difficulties — they must be brought together, or neither can advance."