Black Legacy Connection: Irene Mitchell Reed embodied the adaptability of the Great Migration

Editor's note: This story is in collaboration with the Elyria Black Legacy Connection and its members, who conducted research as part of a series of articles for Black History Month. ELYRIA — Though she was born in the South, Irene Mitchell Reed would call Elyria home from a young age and embodied the adaptability and resilience of the Black Americans who migrated to Elyria. Irene Mitchell was born Aug. 22, 1917, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to Washington Mitchell Jr. and Correta Sanford Mitchell. Irene's grandparents were Washington Mitchell Sr. and Elmira Blackman Mitchell, who both were born in the mid 1840s in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, during enslavement. Washington and Correta Mitchell had 11 children, with Irene being the youngest. A sharecropping family in Tennessee, the Mitchells would move to Ohio seeking better opportunities and lives. Irene would arrive in Ohio after 1920, when she was only about 3. In 1920, Irene's older brother, Joe, who had already moved to Elyria, died at the age of 18. Joe Mitchell had been living in Elyria with relatives working as a laborer at the steel mill. He was living with his aunt, Martha, and her husband John Anderson. Irene would follow suit when she came up to Elyria, and by 1930 she was living with the Andersons in a home they owned on Bell Avenue. John Anderson was a veteran of the First World War, and he worked at Fox Furnace in Elyria. Irene graduated from Elyria High School in 1936. She met a young man named Johnny Reed who had also migrated from the South, hailing from Birmingham, Alabama. The two would marry and create their own family, though that family got off to a sad start in 1939. Irene was pregnant and gave birth to her son on July 26. The baby died just four hours after he was born, appearing on a Lorain County death certificate only as "Baby Boy Mitchell." Her journey brought a lot of adversity to her life with the changing dynamics of moving from the rural South to living with relatives in Elyria, losing her brother before she had arrived to meet him and losing a child within four hours of giving birth. Irene Mitchell Reed died on March 30, 1986. Her life, from the legacies left by her relatives who fought through the years of enslavement to building a family in Elyria, displays the human capacity to adapt and overcome so many things in life. Today we remember Irene Mitchell Reed — southern born, but Elyria raised.