Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell

January 2, 1898
November 1, 1989

Sadie T. M. Alexander was a pioneer among African-American women in law and education and a committed civil rights activist. She was born Sadie Tanner Mossell in Philadelphia, to an accomplished family: Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, among the most prominent of nineteenth-century black clergymen, was her grandfather, and the painter Henry Ossawa Tanner was her uncle. Educated in Philadelphia and in Washington, D.C., she graduated from the M Street High School (now Dunbar High School) in Washington. She entered the University of Pennsylvania's School of Education in 1915, receiving a B.S. in education with honors in 1918. (That year, she helped found the Gamma Chapter of the Delta Theta Sorority.) She earned an M.A. (1919) and a Ph.D. in economics (1921) from the University of Pennsylvania and was one of the first two African-American women to earn a Ph.D. in the United States and the first African American to receive a doctorate in economics.

From 1921 to 1923 Alexander was an assistant actuary for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, a black-owned company in Durham, North Carolina. On November 29, 1923, she married Raymond Pace Alexander, a graduate of Harvard Law School, who thereafter worked with his wife in numerous Philadelphia-area civil rights cases. Sadie Alexander continued to be a trailblazer for African-American women in the fields of law and education: She entered the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1924 (where her father, Aaron Albert Mossell, had graduated in 1888, becoming the first African American to graduate from the law school), worked on the law review, and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar after graduating in 1927. During the late 1920s and 1930s she served as the assistant city solicitor of Philadelphia and as a partner in her husband's law firm. In November 1943 Alexander became the first woman to be elected secretary (or to hold any office) in the National Bar Association, a position she held until 1947.

In addition to her personal achievements and triumphs in overcoming racial barriers, for over half a century Sadie Alexander was at the forefront of the movement for civil rights for African Americans. In the 1920s and 1930s she and her husband successfully challenged discrimination in public accommodations in Pennsylvania. She also worked to integrate the University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Armed Forces. On December 5, 1946, President Harry S. Truman appointed her to the President's Commission on Civil Rights. She helped prepare its report, "To Secure These Rights" (1948), which was influential in the formulation of civil rights policy in the years that followed. Alexander worked with her husband until 1959, when he was appointed judge in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and she began her own law practice. In 1976 she joined the law firm of Atkinson, Myers, Archie & Wallace as counsel, advising the firm on a part-time basis in estate and family law. Alzheimer's disease forced her retirement in 1982. She died in Philadelphia seven years later.

See also Civil Rights Movement, U.S.

Bibliography

Dannett, Sylvia G. L. Profiles of Negro Womanhood, vol. 3: 20th Century. Yonkers, N.Y.: Educational Heritage, 1966.

Malveaux, Julianne. "Missed Opportunity: Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander and the Economic Profession." American Economic Review 81, no. 2 (March 1991): 307–310.

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