4/11/2021 Unsung and Unknown — Graphic Biography Details Life of First Black Lieutenant Governor, Oscar Dunn Historians in the News Brian Mitchell's second-grade teacher set him straight: No Black man ever had been the lieutenant governor of Louisiana — and he was wrong for saying his ancestor, Oscar Dunn, had been just that. The class made fun, and "I still feel the sting," Mitchell writes 45 years later in the introduction to his new biography, "Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana" (Historic New Orleans Collection). It reads like a comic book story of panels and pictures, and the first page shows the scolded 8-year-old Brian at his school desk thinking, "How could she not know?"