“I guess I wanted to become a Page. The fact that it was history-making didn’t really affect me. Because you don’t feel or sense history while it’s being made. You’re just going through the motions of living your life. I mean, and the perspective of what I did and when I did it is really only something I’ve thought about from a deep historical context in the last few years. I mean, it was five weeks after the Edmund Pettus Bridge incident in Selma, Alabama. That’s—I mean, again, why my mother let me go or how my mother let me go is incredible to me.”
Frank Mitchell, August 6, 2008

Frank Mitchell, first African-American [House] Page, photograph, 1965. Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives