Raymond Pace Alexander (October 13, 1897 - November 24, 1974) was the first African-American civil rights leader, lawyer, politician and judge who was appointed to the Pennsylvania Court of Public Pleas. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1923, Alexander became one of Philadelphia's leading civil rights lawyers. He represents black defendants in famous cases, including Trenton Six, a group of black men arrested for murder in Trenton, New Jersey. Alexander also entered politics, running for judge several times before being elected to seat in Philadelphia City Council in 1951. After two years in office, Alexander was appointed to the General Court, where he served until his death in 1974.
Video Raymond Pace Alexander
Early life and education
Alexander was born into a working-class black league in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 13, 1897. His parents, like many African Americans in the 1860s and 1870s, had left the countryside in the South looking for economic opportunities and escaped violence accompany Jim Crow. His father, Hillard Boone Alexander, was born a slave in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, and migrated to Philadelphia with his brother, Samuel, in 1880. That same year, Raymond's mother, Virginia Pace, also migrated to Philadelphia with his brother, John Schollie Speed; they were born as slaves in Essex County, Virginia. Hillard and Virginia were married in Philadelphia in 1882.
The family, like many urban blacks, lives in the Seventh Ward (now the western part of the Central City). Her father and uncle are "horse-riding" who teaches horseback riding to the rich white man in Philadelphia. But in 1915, the rise of the automobile era caused business to decline and ultimately failed.
In 1909, Alexander's mother died of pneumonia. Although Alexander soon began working to help support the family, his father felt unable to provide adequate care for the children and sent Alexander and three siblings (including his sister Virginia) to live with their aunt and uncle, Georgia and John Pace, in growing up the black community in North Philadelphia. The Paces is a working class family as well. With more mouths to feed, Alexander continues to work through elementary and high school to help support himself and his siblings. The occupations he held during those years included working on a dock that broke fish, sold newspapers, and had boots where he worked six days per week. Alexander also worked at the Metropolitan Opera House in North Philadelphia for six years, beginning when he was 16 years old. Then, looking back on his lifetime at Met, Alexander said that he had "opened a new world to me," and he praised the environment by giving him "some of the smoothness and culture that characterized my last years."
Alexander attended High School and graduated in 1917, delivered a speech "The Future of American Negroes," at his commencement ceremony. Alexander attended the University of Pennsylvania on a merit scholarship and became the first black graduate of the Wharton School of Business in 1920. He was later enrolled at Harvard Law School. While there, Alexander supported himself by working as a teaching assistant during the school year. In the summer, he took classes for a master's degree in political science at Columbia University and worked as a porter for Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. While still at law school, Alexander brought his first discrimination suit, suing Madison Square Garden for refusing entry because of his race, a violation of the same rights law in New York. (Since he has not been banned, Alexander hired a lawyer to represent him.)
Maps Raymond Pace Alexander
Legal career
Alexander graduated from Harvard Law in 1923. That same year, he married a former Penn classmate, Sadie Tanner Mossell. Mossell is the grandson of Benjamin Tucker Tanner and in 1927 will be the first black woman to earn a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. They will have two daughters, Rae and Mary. He passed the Pennsylvania exam in 1923, becoming one of several black lawyers in the state. Despite his mandate, Alexander had trouble finding jobs in Philadelphia after graduating. In the end, he took a position at John R.K's law office. Scott, a former Republican congressman with a small office in town. Soon, he opened his own office focusing on representing blacks.
He soon became famous in the black community of Philadelphia. In 1924, he represented Louise Thomas, a black woman accused of killing a black policeman. After he was convicted and sentenced to death, Alexander gave him a new court where he was found not guilty, the first in the history of Pennsylvania law. That same year, he filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit against a cinema owner in Philadelphia who refused entry to black ticket holders. He lost the case, but it still raises his profile as a black lawyer who is willing to fight for equal rights. Around this time, Alexander began to identify with the black intellectual "Negro" movement, which advocated self-help, racial pride, and protest against injustice. He also joined the National Bar Association, a black lawyer association formed when its founding members were denied membership in the American Bar Association. Despite the NBA, Alexander began to use political protest as well as legal action in the struggle for equal rights. His company, which now includes his wife and Maceo W. Hubbard, moved into a new building on 19th and Chestnut Roads.
Berwyn desegregation case
In 1932, Alexander was involved with efforts to delegate schools in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. After Easttown Township built a new primary school, the neighboring town of Tredyffrin closed their school and paid to send their students to Easttown (the Berwyn region was part of both cities). Easttown transformed their older and smaller school buildings into one "for the instruction of certain people," which in practice means all the black students in the district, separating previously integrated schools. As a result, 212 African-American students began boycotting public schools. The families hired Alexander to press the issue in court.
With the help of the NAACP, Alexander negotiated with the school board to end the boycott, but the impasse continued until 1933. Tensions escalated when state Attorney General William A. Schnader ordered black parents who were prosecuted for refusing to send their children to school. Some refused to pay bail and stayed in prison in protest. Alexander agreed with the strategy, while the NAACP considered it too confrontational; they also rejected Alexander's help from the International Labor Defense lawyer for fear of connecting with the left-wing group.
When the boycott continued in 1934, groups held a protest march in Philadelphia. Schnader, now running for governor, now pledged to find a solution. Alexander and others credited Schnader's conversion to his recognition of the influence of black voter influence in Pennsylvania. In June, the school board agreed to allow students to be admitted to two schools racially-neutral, and parents ended their boycott. The following year, country representative Hobson R. Reynolds, a black Republican from Philadelphia, successfully proposed an equally powerful law in the state legislature to prevent a similar situation from happening again.
The growth of prestige
Alexander rose to national prominence in the black legal community after Berwyn's case, and he began speaking throughout the country at the National Bar Association show, serving as president of the organization from 1933 to 1935. In 1942, he represented Thomas Mattox, a black teenager. , as Mattox fought an extradition to Georgia where he was accused of attacking a white man. Alexander argued that Mattox would not accept a fair trial in the South, and the judges agreed, canceling the extradition effort. He also represents Corrine Sykes, a 23-year-old black assistant who is accused of murdering his white master. This time, Alexander was unsuccessful, because the jury ignored his argument that Sykes suffered a mental breakdown and found him guilty; after an appeal to the United States Supreme Court was rejected, Sykes was executed in 1946.
Trenton Six
In 1948, Alexander was involved with the Trenton Six case, a group of black men arrested in Trenton, New Jersey, accused of robbery and murder. Trenton Police induced confessions from five of six people, and all were convicted by a white jury and sentenced to death. The Civil Rights Congress, the legal arm of the communist party, represents three of the men during their appeal; The NAACP, at the request of their chief adviser, Thurgood Marshall, hired Alexander to represent two others. In 1949, the New Jersey Supreme Court granted the new court to men but forbade the CRC to represent one of the defendants as they found that the group unfairly affected the swimming judge through the news media.
In a 1951 birthday trial, Alexander proved that the police had made proof to secure a quick belief and a calm public worries about the waves of crime and rippling through Trenton. The judge also ruled out the recognition, which proved to have been imposed. After a long trial, four people were released and two were convicted, with the jury recommending life imprisonment. Although not a complete victory, Alexander has proven his expertise as a lawyer and saves his client's life, while managing to distance himself from CLC and other communist groups, an important consideration in the atmosphere of the Cold War.
Political and legal career
Search for judicial nomination
In the 1930s, Alexander's civil rights activities got him involved in local politics. At that time, the Republican Party dominated Philadelphia's political stage, and Alexander ran to sit on the Common Pleas Court as a Republican in 1933, but resigned before the election, a decision reported by the Philadelphia Tribune poor health. He became frustrated with the Republican organization, which only offered the lowest-level city job protection for blacks. Nonetheless, he saw Republicans as the best opportunity for African-American advancement in the city and lobbied party leaders to nominate black lawyers - preferably him - for one of the judicial seats for elections in 1937. He found little support, and lost in the main election for three party-backed candidates: Byron A. Milner, Clare G. Fenerty, and John Robert Jones. This made the Republicans, like Democrats, with tickets all white again in 1937.
After the election, Alexander joined many blacks in that era in changing his loyalty to the Democrats. In 1940, however, Alexander decided that the Democrats were no more likely than the Republican Party to elect a black judge and, dissatisfied with the New Testament and the lack of party action on civil rights, he returned to the Republican Party. Sadie Alexander had followed her husband's political change to the Democrats and remained there, and in 1946 President Harry S. Truman appointed him to the Civil Rights Committee. Alexander rejoined the Democrat Party in 1947 and campaigned for Truman the following year.
After Truman's election, Alexander lobbied to be appointed to the seat of the federal district court. Around the same time, he was rumored to be among the candidates for a seat in the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, but his position went to William H. Hastie instead, making Hastie the first federal appeals court judge in 1950 Alexander biographer David A. Canton , indicating that the frequent replacement of parties by Alexander and the perceived disloyalty to the Democratic Party may have damaged his chances in a nomination. After his attempt at a seat on the federal bench failed, Alexander sought the appointment of his foreign service, expressed his special wish to become Ambassador to Haiti or Ethiopia; he did not succeed.
City Council
In the late 1940s, Alexander joined the ranks of the growing reform movement in the Democratic Party of Philadelphia. The group is led by Joseph S. Clark Jr. and Richardson Dilworth, a former Republican who left their party in machine politics, and James A. Finnegan, a leader of the Democratic organization who sees that growing desires for civil service reform and good governance can lift his party from perennial minority status by attracting independent voters. After the reformers passed the new city charter in 1951, Alexander won the Democratic primary to represent the 5th district in the City Council. In an election in November, Alexander won easily, taking 58% of the vote against Republican President Eugene J. Sullivan. Democrats swept nine of the ten-district councils and elected mayor Clark, ending the 67-year-old Republican government in the city.
Alexander's campaign for the council emphasized the message of merit elections for city workers as well as increasing the number of black employees. The promise of civil service reforms gained the confidence of black voters, who have traditionally been abandoned from the Republican patronage system. In 1953, Alexander introduced a resolution on the council demanding that the wholly-white Girard College accept black students, or lose its tax-exempt status. The case injured his way through the courts, led by civil rights activist Cecil B. Moore; the school will eventually be degraded, but not until 1968, shortly after Alexander left the City Council.
He won re-election in 1955 with an increase in the vote: 70%. While there, Alexander continues to press the cause of civil service reforms. In 1954, he successfully opposed the efforts of Democrat colleagues James Hugh Joseph Tate and Michael J. Towey to undermine civil service reforms of the new charter. Two years later, Aleksander remained opposed, but the proponents of the amendment found the necessary two-thirds vote on the Council to make it a ballot for the approval of the people. The referendum on the issue failed in April's ballot.
Judge
In 1957, Congress Earl Chudoff resigned from the 4th district seat of the House of Representatives to become a judge in the General Courts. The district is about 75% black, and the Democrats want a black candidate to replace the white-skinned Chudoff. They settled in Robert N. C. Nix Sr., a local lawyer. Alexander also announced his candidacy for the chair; according to his biographer Alexander was less interested in serving in Congress than using the influence of a major challenge to force the party organization to support him as a judge. How it works. Alexander was soon out of the race and Nix was elected. Governor George M. Leader appointed Alexander to a judicial position and on January 5, 1959, he was sworn in, the first black judge to sit on Court of Common Pleas. In the final election of that year, he won a ten-year tenure in court.
In Alexander's first year in court, he was troubled by the high number of black defendants he saw and attempted to correct the problem by creating an alternative experimental system for first offenders called the "Spiritual Rehabilitation Program", with funding logistical support coming from local churches and synagogues. The program gained national attention due to its innovative approach to crime but failed to gain much support outside the black churches. He also found himself dragged back into the political world when Republicans demanded that the jury assemble to investigate Democratic corruption in City Hall; Alexander rejected their request.
Alexander continues to be active as a civil rights leader, but clashed with young activists over the methods most appropriate to achieve their goals. In 1962, for example, while Alexander urged increased representation of blacks at the Philadelphia Council for Community Advancement, he disagreed with the call of NAACP branch president Cecil B. Moore to boycott corporate donors to the group. While supporting Martin Luther King's civil dissent campaign in the South in 1964, he believes some of the acts have injured his cause by alienating white voters; he called on black leaders to "stop unnecessary demonstrations, dismissals, unintentional lies, especially in the North that bring us ugliness." In 1966, he condemned the Black Power movement as "dangerous and insignificant and dangerous and divisive for the Negro like the white racism we have been fighting for so long."
Despite the differences with Moore and others, Alexander continues to achieve his lifelong racial equality goals. In 1969, he asked the city to hire more black employees, and in 1972 wrote an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer that called on the Philadelphia Police Department to do the same. Meanwhile, he spoke against black separatism, calling it "reverse racism." The focus is increasingly on how economic problems exacerbate racial issues, and he calls for universal basic income and affirmative action to fix problems. However, according to Canton, in the 1970s black youth saw Alexander and his generation of civil rights leaders as "out of touch and overly dependent on white elites."
On the night of November 25, 1974, Alexander was found dead of a heart attack in his court rooms. Leon Sullivan inaugurated Alexander's funeral at Philadelphia's First Baptist Church, after which he was buried at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
References
Source
External links
- Raymond Pace Alexander Papers 1880-1975 at the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Archives Center
- Raymond Pace Alexander in the Search of the Mausoleum
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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