raymond pace alexander Raymond Pace Alexander a new negro lawyer fights for civil rights in philadelphia David A. Canton University Press of Mississippi / Jackson www.upress.state.ms.us Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. All photographs are courtesy of Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Archives. Copyright © 2010 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2010 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Canton, David A. Raymond Pace Alexander : a new Negro lawyer fights for civil rights in Philadelphia / David A. Canton. p. cm. — (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-60473-425-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Alexander, Raymond Pace, 1898–1974. 2. African American lawyers—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia— Biography. 3. African Americans—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia— Biography. 4. Civil rights—Pennsylvania—History—20th century. I. Title. KF373.A385C36 2010 340.092—dc22 [B] 2009043743 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available contents vii Introduction Part One Alexander’s Race Radicalism and the New Negro Lawyer, 1898–1937 3 chapter one The Origin of a New Negro Lawyer, 1898–1924 27 chapter two Using the Left to Fight for What Is Right Civil Rights Law and Radicalism, 1925–1935 Part Two From Race Radical to Racial Reformer, 1936–1953 61 chapter three Making a National Movement Local The Civil Rights Struggle in Philadelphia, 1936–1948 93 chapter four The Cold War, Northern Scottsboro, and the Politics of Civil Rights, 1949–1953 vi contents Part Three A New Negro Judge During the Civil Rights/Black Power Era, 1954–1974 125 chapter five Participating in the Civil Rights Movement from the Bench, 1954–1964 158 chapter six A New Negro Judge in Black Power America, 1965–1974 189 Conclusion 195 Notes 215 Bibliography 227 Index introduction The most powerful recollection of what made Raymond Pace Alexander a leading civil rights attorney in Philadelphia came from his wife, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, who also became a successful lawyer. In 1965, the Phila- delphia Evening Bulletin published a twenty-page report titled “The Negro in Philadelphia,” chronicling the history of African Americans in that city. Sadie recounted in the report an incident that had occurred while she was an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. In December 1918, Sadie asked her classmate Raymond Pace Alexander to escort her and two friends visiting from Cornell University to the movie theater. Raymond and the other man purchased four tickets to the Schubert Theater in down- town Philadelphia. When the four students arrived at the theater, the young men presented their tickets to the theater’s manager, but he prohibited them from entering, saying that there had been a mistake and some other people had purchased their tickets for the same seats. Furious, “Alex began excitedly talking in Spanish,” and the other three “chimed in with French phrases.” After witnessing their foreign language proficiency, the theater manager said, “Why, they are not Niggers!” and allowed them to enter the theater. Once inside, they looked over to the seats they had purchased and noticed that they were empty. After the incident, Raymond Pace Alexander and Sadie Tanner Mossell vowed “if we ever become lawyers, we are going to break this thing— segregation and discrimination. And, yes—we are going to open up those restaurants, too. You just wait! Just wait!”1 This incident exemplifies just one of the many racial barriers that African Americans in northern cities encoun- tered during the first two decades of the twentieth century. vii viii introduction The theater incident occurred six months after W. E. B. DuBois wrote his controversial editorial, “Close Ranks,” for The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). DuBois contended that African Americans must “forget our special griev- ances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy” in the Great War. After the war “to make the world safe for democracy,” however, African Americans continued to meet with racial terrorism and hostility, ranging from lynch- ing and race riots in the South to segregation and political marginalization in the North. Black citizens’ heightened expectations were met with white backlash.2 When Americans reflect on the civil rights struggle, they immediately think of the southern movement, of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery and Birmingham, the March on Washington, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. From 1865 to 1965, the South was politically, socially, economically, and culturally committed to white suprem- acy and de jure segregation. Southern Democrats used racism to destroy the economically radical, biracial Populist movement, advocated violence and lynchings to intimidate southern blacks, and disfranchised both blacks and poor whites. African Americans responded by constructing their own com- munity institutions, creating mutual aid societies, and relocating to more promising places.3 De jure segregation started in the South; however, historian C. Vann Woodward argues, “One of the strangest things about the career of Jim Crow was that the system was born in the North and reached an advanced age before moving South in force.” By 1830, most northern states had abolished slavery and replaced it with segregation, a system that denied African Ameri- cans equal access to public resources, funds for education, relief, and munici- pal employment. Whites segregated blacks in public spaces such as parks, theaters, beaches, and other public accommodations. African Americans in the North struggled for civil rights continuously, first in the abolitionist movement and then in black regiments during the Civil War. After Eman- cipation, black citizens in the North joined their emancipated brothers and sisters in the South to defend personal liberties from Reconstruction until the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson declared “separate but equal” constitutional.4 Despite the long history of civil rights activism in the urban north, it was the southern movement that historians studied and a paradigm emerged introduction ix that views the civil rights struggle as a southern movement. The first gen- eration of civil rights scholarship used a “top down” approach and concen- trated on male figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr., the role of the federal government, and the activities of national civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Charles Eagles argues that historians who had participated in the civil rights movement were unable to be critical of the movement’s leaders, tactics, and goals.5 During the last twenty years, civil rights historiography working from the “bottom up” emphasized the importance of grassroots activism, especially women leaders, and explored the tactical and ideological tensions among civil rights lead- ers and organizations. The new approach demonstrated African American agency and organizational sophistication of southern black communities.6 Recent studies have begun to chronicle the civil rights struggle in the North, and these scholars contend that a northern civil rights struggle existed simultaneously with the southern civil rights movement. By the mid-forties, the growing black population in northern cities began to protest their exclu- sion from beaches and amusement parks, union jobs, and federally funded housing projects. Black voters provided black leaders political power that they transformed into municipal and union jobs and greater access to local and state resources. Unlike the southern movement, the northern civil rights struggle does not have a national figure such as Martin Luther King Jr. As a result, there is not a national narrative that focuses on the civil rights activity of King. The northern civil rights struggle was a local affair that consisted of a plethora of individuals and organizations.7 In order to set the civil rights activism of black northern city-dwellers in historical perspective, however, we must begin much earlier in the twen- tieth century with the Great Migration. World War I transformed the situ- ation of African Americans and laid the groundwork for the northern civil rights struggle. Before the war, 90 percent of the U.S. black population lived in the South. In most northern cities, the black community was too small to pose a threat to white political and economic power. Race relations were relatively trouble-free as long as African Americans remained in their place. The onset of the Great War in Europe led to a precipitous decline in the number of European immigrants, and northern employers facing labor short- ages recruited black workers. The first Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North began during World War I, and, according to Woodward, the “trend toward racism in the North was amply illustrated in the years immediately following the First World War.” Instead of embracing these new