The Race Racket: Black Rights, Confidence Men, and the Lives and Crimes of Z. W. Mitchell

This article focuses on the career of Zedekiah W. Mitchell, a prolific African American con man, and the Loyal Legion of Labor, his fraudulent movement “to uplift the race.” It reads Mitchell as an example of the civil rights confidence man, who profiteered from the desires of Black and White Americans to address the “negro problem.” Operating at the intersections of the “golden age of con artistry” and the nadir of race relations in the United States, Mitchell’s exploits can both complicate and expand our understanding of the confidence man in American culture. At the same time, Mitchell’s deceptions illustrate the complex and highly contested nature of the struggle for Black rights and racial uplift at the turn of the twentieth century as well as how the country’s emerging civil rights infrastructure also created opportunities for those who sought to make “a racket out of race.”