The school lasted five years,and Arthur moved to Birmingham,where he turned to buying and selling real estate.Not very many months after arriving in Birmingham,Arthur moved Sumter County to take advantage of an opportunity to partner with the white owner of Fair Oaks Plantation,between the rural communities of Gainesville and Panola.The two men established the African American Building Loan and Real Estate Company and reopened the West Alabama Normal and Industrial Institute on October 28,1908.An attempt to trap poor African Americans in cheap labor on farms,Arthur activities were nothing More than willing participation in an unscrupulous peonage scheme.Arthur's school was a two story building surrounded by a large garden plot planted by students ranging from 7-16.It was staffed by him, his wife,and at least one other teacher.The academy receive mixed reviews from students and parents.One man recalled many decades later that Arthur "worked the devil out of the students." Children gained only some rudimentary lessons in both classroom and field work,and their parents learned advanced agricultural practices at school-sponsored institutes.Through mailed solicitations as well as personal appearances before northern philanthropic groups,Arthur siphoned funds away from more worthy Tuskegee.
Booker tried to distance himself and Tuskegee from Arthur's with warnings to donors about the questionable nature of Arthur's operation in West Alabama.Booker particularly took issue with Arthur's claims of his approval and support in the school's letters and literature.Learning of Booker's attempts at separating his school from Arthur's activities,the ex-student blackmailed his mentor into a retraction by paying a Tuskegee telegraph operator to intercept personally damaging messages sent by Booker.With timber at Fair Oaks.And now African Americans locked on land,Arthur's usefulness to the plantation's owner ended.The school's main building burned mysteriously in late 1911,and by 1912 Arthur was ready with a new operation a few miles south on a plantation near Geiger.Once again workers lured to the property with false promises of educational opportunities for their children.During the summers of Arthur's years in Sumter County,he attended special non-degree programs,among other things,were attended to give attendees better command of English composition and diction.The new school at Geiger lasted only until January 13,1915,when another unexplained fire destroyed the operation Arthur next set up shop in West Butler,Choctaw,County,where he took an administrative position with an existing school,Armstrong Agricultural Institute.Back in Geiger,rumors began circulating in the community that the school principal had actually set fire to collect property insurance.Armstrong continued to operate until 1919,when Arthur,facing legal programs over allegedly defrauding poor African Americans of their land,fled with wife Annie and son Arthur Wergs Mitchell Jr.For Washington.Choctaw County court records reveal a number of pending lawsuits against Arthur.He had apparently tricked illiterate African Americans into turning over their land titles to him.In each case,Arthur,managed to avoid prosecution by remaing one step ahead of accusers.Fleeing to Washington D.C.
Facing arrest,Arthur left Alabama in haste and in 1919 arrived in Washington D.C.,where he used illegally acquired funds to purchase apartments and to study law.With no formal training,he passed the District of Columbia bar exam.A master of self-aggrandizement and fabrication,Arthur ingratiated himself into the African American fraternity Phi Beta Sigma,becoming its national president and gaining important contacts that eventually lead him to accept a position in 1928 of running the Chicago campaign for Republican presidential nominee Herbert Hoover.
Impressed by unusual political opportunities for African Americans in Chicago,including Oscar Depriest's election to Congress,Arthur moved there in 1929 to pursue his own career in politics.After realizing that it would be impossible for him to become prominent in the Republican Party,he quickly realized that the Democratic Party offered better opportunities,given its scarcity of African American members and candidates.Active in precint and ward politics,Arthur gained the attention of local party boss Joseph F.Tittinger,who recognized him as someone devoted to personal gain and success and who would not interfere with schemes by white political leaders that would adversely affect African American constituents in 1934 Harry Baker,the white Democratic nominee for Illinois's First Congressional District,died thus opening the way for Arthur as the replacement candidate.He received backing from Chicago's powerful Democratic political machine,and his candidacy way buoyed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's popularity that year.These factors,along with solid white support,were enough for Arthur to overcome African American Republican incumbent Oscar Depriest's popularity among African American constituents and score an upset victory.
To prepare Arthur for service in Washington,D.C., Cook County Democratic party head Patrick J.Nash instructed Arthur not to do anything endanger passage of Roosevelt's New Deal reconstruction programs.Following directions,Arthur distance himself from the NAACP or anti-lynching and other issues deemed offensive to Congressmen from southern states.Arthur,as the only African-American in Congress,refused to assume a role as the nation's "Negro representative." Overall,during his first term Arthur avoided divisive activities while proclaiming how much better southern whites understood African-American than northern.He directed African Americans who wrote for assistance back to their representatives,stating that his only constituents were residents of Illinois's First District.He introduced bill that did not raise objections from white lawmakers,suck as recognizing Matthew Henson's North Pole feats and another designing Booker T.Washington's Virgina birthplace a historic landmark.When Federal legislation against lynching came up in Congress,he backed his own weaker bill over the more strongly worded NAACP-supported proposal.When southern Democrats,whom he had expected to support him,opposed his bill Arthur threw his support behind his stronger bill.During his first three terms in the House of Representatives,he promoted the mythology that African-Americans in the rural South were more fortunate than their counterparts who lived in the Urban North.Believed that confrontational efforts toward civil rights would aggravate desegregation in the region.Although he did use his congressional appointments to name several African-American young men to the service academies,his roll-call votes mostly reflected those of his fellow Chicago House Democrats.
Arthur proved,to be valuable in recruiting African Americans from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party through his leadership of the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) Colored Division in the West during the 1932 & 1936 presidential campaigns.In each state,Arthur hired and supervised African-Americans workers to campaign for Roosevel among African American voters.He lierally spanned the nation during both election,speaking favorably of Roosevelt and of New Deal accomplishments on behalf of African Americans.During the late 1930s,Arthur recognition among African-Americans college students was exceeded only by that of boxing champion Joe Louis and Olympian Jesse Owen.
During his forth term,Arthur finally began to achieve independence from Chicago's political leaders.After being forced from first-class railroad accommodations in Arkansas,he sued the the offending carriers,the Illinois Central,Pullman,and Rock Island railroad companies.The case case went to the Supreme Court on appeal,and the justices decided that following the separate-but equal doctrine meant that transportation companies must offer first-class service upon request to both whites and African-Americans wishing to purchase better accommodations.Arthur's victory against Chicago-based carriers antagonized leaders of the city's powerful political machine.Lawmaker's verbal assault in speeches from the House floor against defense contractors guilty of discriminination was also an apparent of anger and friction with Chicago party officials.Hearing they would be backing Republican-turned Democrat William L.Dawson candidacy in 1942,Arthur declined to run for reelection that year.
He retired to an estate south of Petersburg,Virginia,where created Rose-Anna Gardens,complete with a mansion fashioned after Tara,the O'Hara plantation in Gone with the Wind.Between 1942 and his death,he raised blue-ribbon cattle and prize-winning roses.A widower twice,Arthur married three times,and had only one son named Arthur Wergs Mitchell Jr.,who spent the greater part of his adulthood in a mental hospital.Although Arthur spent only one year at Tuskegee University Booker T.Washington's self-help philosophy remained with the former student.Unfortunately he often put that discrimination in his later life,however,to some degree relflected a more sensitive social conscience that brought real benefits to African-Americans in the United States.
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