Hitting the Right Notes
Or so says the lawyer and music industry veteran, who won a Grammy in 2005 for producing the Ray Charles album Genius Loves Company, and later donated the award to the Black Cultural Center.
But for Mizell, a microphone is as much about amplifying other voices as his own. Throughout his career, he has merged his two passions, entertainment and activism, to raise political awareness. The guiding light has been the memory of his uncle Von Mizell, a doctor and civil rights leader in South Florida who founded the Broward County NAACP.
“It’s kind of in my family DNA,” says Mizell, a sociology & anthropology major at Swarthmore, the first Black Thomas J. Watson Fellow from the College, and a graduate of Harvard Law. His beloved uncle once told him that he fights for those who can’t fight for themselves.
“That really stuck with me,” says Mizell.
A fan of music with a message, Mizell moved to Los Angeles after law school to carve out a career in entertainment. After landing a job as a publicity writer, Mizell became connected with Stevie Wonder at the height of his stardom. Mizell helped Wonder launch a radio station and spearhead a campaign to create a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. — the first holiday to honor an African American in the nation’s history.
Another of his proudest achievements was being instrumental in the founding of Swarthmore’s Black Cultural Center in 1970 as chairman of SASS. Now semi-retired and living in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Mizell is still finding ways to make a difference.
In 2016, he paid tribute to his late uncle by leading a campaign to rename a Broward County beach in his honor. Dr. Von D. Mizell–Eula Johnson State Park recognizes the efforts of the two civil rights leaders to create a beach for Black residents in the 1950s. Their work led to full desegregation of the county’s beaches a decade later.
Mizell — a Eugene Lang ’38 H’81 Award Winner in 2016 — says going forward you can count on him to have an impact, through music or otherwise.
“This media, politics, art thing — it’s something that’s integrally interwoven in the fabric of my being,” he says. “It’s who I am. It’s what I do.”