Atlanta Daily World

A MAN'S ATHLETE
A tall, slightly greying young man walked across the stage Tuesday to receive his bachelor of arts degree from Morehouse College president Benjamin E. Mays, then smiled broadly and passed to his seat to rejoin the anonymity of the mortar board and gown. There were no cheers for him individually in respect to newly-enforced graduation etiquette, but there might well have been some relaxation of this rule if memories in the atomic era are not so short.

The young man - George (Bubber) Mitchell, who came down from Detroit in the late Thirties to play like the devil in sports and to go into the archives as one of the most controversial athletes in Maroon Tiger history.

Mitchell in his triumphant days had all the requisites of a great athlete. Old timers insist he was a man's athlete as they watched him cavort in basketball, football and track doing everything well and with the studied indifference that marks the truly great.

Mitchell was as spectacular in sports as he was in everyday life. It was like him to snare a game-winning pass against Alabama State back in '38.

To play like a Jim Thorpe to wreck a highly-rated LeMoyne team in the mud that same year at Spillers Field and to run like a gazelle on the track. His 440 yards mark stood in the SIAC until 1949, when Xavier's Clayton Clark ran it into discard.

In the front row seats Thursday watching Mitchell graduate was Ulysses Amos, another Detroiter, who deserves columnar mention.

Mitchell, Amos, Joe Allen and Macon Lee (whose record-setting mile relay gallop still stands on the SIAC ledger) were prime rivals.

Yet this is Mitchell's story.

Mitchell and Amos, two great friends and two over-powering competitors against each other, rocketed and battled until the Forties when war clouds belched out of Pearl Harbor.

Then Mitchell went off to war. He advanced through the ranks and was commissioned a captain.

War records reveal him a great soldier whose gallantry in combat is one of the great stories of the war.

Wounded, left for dead, his fighting heart brought him back to civvies in a condition that would have wrecked lesser men.

He told me some of the horrors experienced in that global conflict one night in Chicago's El Grotto where mirth and rhythm were abounding. Even in the smoky, garish, and low-ceiling splendor of the nightery the stench of the dead, waste of combat, gun-pounding horror of that catastrophic excursion battered my ears.

Mitchell had been through it all yet, he came back to his college at an age when most men call it off and cover up....to get his degree.

His old citymate and work-horse team mate Ulysses Amos, who was in Atlanta for his class reunion worked through the crowd to pump his hands.

Most folks witnessing the commencement didn't know this about Mitchell but the boys like Eddie Culp, Leo Tarrant, Mozelle Ellerbe, Herbie Douglas applaud him a first rate competitor.

Mitchell had the knack of making friends and enemies. Yet, he was a man's athlete and one of the great SIAC athletes.

I just thought you might like to know!!!!