Article Reprint
Billy Mitchell’s first encounter with the Apollo Theater came about entirely by chance. It was 1965 and he was fifteen, living in the South Bronx with his mother and eight of his fourteen siblings. The family had been reunited after an eviction from their Mount Vernon home five years prior, but now Mitchell’s mother was struggling to keep her children clean and fed. As the oldest, Billy was sent off one afternoon to borrow grocery money from an aunt who lived on 126th Street.