Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft (née Freeman-Mitford, later Romilly; 11 September 1917 – 23 July 1996) was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics.

Jessica (known as "Decca" to family and friends) later described her conservative father as "one of nature's fascists", renounced her privileged background while still a teenager, and became an adherent of communism.

[1] At the age of 19, Mitford fell in love with her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was recuperating from dysentery caught while defending Madrid with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

[5] At the outset of World War II, Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force; Mitford was living in Washington D.C., and considered joining him once he was posted to England.

Through this and her husband's legal practice, she was involved in a number of civil rights campaigns, notably the failed attempt to stop the execution of Willie McGee, an African American convicted of raping a white woman.

While there, she and a friend went to meet the arrival of a group of Freedom Riders and became caught up in a riot when a mob, led by the Ku Klux Klan, attacked the civil rights activists.

The church at which this was held was also attacked by the Klan, and Mitford and the group spent the night barricaded inside until the siege was ended by the arrival of Alabama National Guard troops.

Through his work with unions and death benefits, Treuhaft became interested in the funeral industry and persuaded Mitford to write an investigative article on the subject.

Though the article, "Saint Peter Don't You Call Me", published in Frontier magazine, was not widely disseminated, it caught considerable attention when Mitford appeared on a local television broadcast with two industry representatives.

The book was one of the inspirations for filmmaker Tony Richardson's 1965 film The Loved One, which was based on Evelyn Waugh's short satirical 1948 novel of the same name,[20] subtitled "An Anglo-American Tragedy".

William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman and Marcus Raskin, an account of the five men's 1970 trial on charges of conspiracy to violate the draft laws, followed by a harsh critique of the American prison system entitled Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business (1973), an allusion to the phrase "cruel and unusual punishment".

Mitford was a distinguished professor for the one semester in 1973 at San Jose State University, where she taught a course called "The American Way" that covered the Watergate scandal and the McCarthy era.

The dean insisted that the rule was that she had to swear a loyalty oath and be fingerprinted, although this was not in her contract; she objected, and the campus was thrown into protests and she was forced to go to court to remain able to teach.

[21] Mitford's second memoir, A Fine Old Conflict (1977), comically describes her experiences joining and eventually leaving the Communist Party USA.

She mercilessly teased an elder Communist about what she perceived as his paranoia when he wrote out the name of a town where she could get chickens donated from "loyal party members" for a fund raiser.

She recorded two short albums: one[22] contains her rendition of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Grace Darling",[23] and the other, two duets with friend and poet Maya Angelou.

[1][25] At the time of her death, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote "In this strangely flat era of 'diversity,' she was the rarest of birds, an exotic creature who rose each morning to become the sun around whom thousands of lives revolved.

Her surviving daughter, Constancia Romilly, continued the activist tradition, working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which campaigned for African American civil rights; she eventually became an emergency room nurse.

[27] John Pilger, who had interviewed Mitford in 1983 for his series Outsiders, said she "combined a finely honed social conscience and a wonderful gallows humor.