Dr. Sadie T. M. Alexander
Civil Rights Champion
January 2, 1898 - November 1, 1989 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
"I knew well that the only way I could get that door open was to knock it down; because I knocked all of them down."
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Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander was born in two decades before the passage of the 19th Amendment. Her struggle to achieve equality for African Americans became her lifelong mission. She is remembered as a trailblazer and pioneer who broke barriers of race and gender. She was the first African American woman to achieve a Ph.D. in economics. In 1927, she became the first black woman to gain admission to the Pennsylvania Bar and started a 50-year career advocating for civil and human rights.
Alexander was born into a distinguished African American family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Alexander and her sister spent time in Washington, D.C. and attended the all-Black M Street High School where students attended lectures by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.
In 1915, Alexander enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where her father had been the first African American to gain a law degree from Penn. At Penn, she achieved academic success despite harsh racial discrimination by students, staff, and faculty. She was the first black woman to graduate from Penn. She continued at Penn to earn a master's degree in economics, the first African American woman in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. in economics, Unable to obtain work in her field, she obtained work as an actuary at the black owned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. She returned to Philadelphia in 1923 to marry Raymond Pace Alexander, a Harvard Law graduate. She joined her husband's firm and together helped draft Pennsylvania law prohibiting discrimination in public places. She served as secretary for the National Urban League from 1930 to 1957 and was appointed by President Truman to serve on his Committee on Human Rights in 1947. She practiced law until her retirement in 1982.
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