John Mitchell, Jr., was a newspaper editor, amateur illustrator and political leader in Richmond, Virginia in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He began his career as the Richmond correspondent for the New York
Freeman, and took over the editorship of the
Richmond Planet in 1884. In 1891, early journalism historian I. Garland Penn called Mitchell a "[b]old and fearless writer almost to a fault," whose "forte as an editor [was] to battle against outrages perpetrated upon his people in the South." Mitchell was elected to the Richmond City Council in 1888, but remained the
Planet's editor through the 1890s. Under Mitchell's editorship, the
Planet was an independent critic of moderation. He died in 1929, a penniless man.