Sadie T.M. Alexander, first Black woman in the US to receive a PhD, to be honored with statue in Philadelphia
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander was a woman of many firsts, including being the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the first Black woman to earn a PhD in the United States. A statue in Philadelphia will soon commemorate her life.
An academic, economist and an attorney, Alexander was also a wife and a mother.
"She was unassuming, self-effacing," said Dr. Rae Pace Alexander-Minter. "My mother was the first feminist that I ever knew."
Alexander-Minter is Alexander's youngest daughter, and speaks passionately of her mother's trailblazing legacy.
"She was very keen about women's rights," Alexander-Minter said. "She said to me, 'You always have to have your own money.'"
Alexander-Minter said her mother referred to it as "mad money," an emergency fund stash women referred to in the 1900s.
That was just one of the many lessons her mother shared.
It was at Penn's campus that Alexander started her academic journey. She was one of just a few Blacks who attended the university more than 100 years ago.
"She experienced racial isolation," Alexander-Minter said. "It wasn't that she wanted their friendship. She wanted respect."
Alexander graduated with a Bachelor of Science in education and continued at Penn, where she earned a PhD in economics in 1921.
"She became the first African American, regardless of gender, to have a PhD," Alexander-Minter said. "However, she couldn't get a job because she was a woman, and she was Black."
She was a charter member of Penn's Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated chapter. With the strength of her sorority sisters, she pushed through challenging times.
"She found her voice and herself and companionship in the women of Delta," Alexander-Minter said. "She found a family. She found women who cared about each other. Had I known all of this, had I known half of this, I would've pledged."
Alexander was elected as the first national president of the sorority. She married her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, who became a prominent civil rights activist attorney. She made a life raising their two daughters.
"My father would come home from his practice law school," Alexander-Minter said, "he would talk law, and my mother fell in love with the law."
That sparked another passion.
Alexander returned to Penn as the first African American woman accepted into Penn Law School. She would become the first African American woman to graduate from the prestigious college and the first to pass the Pennsylvania bar.
"She was interested in helping those people who were feeling unrecognized," Alexander-Minter said. "She talked about, as an economist and a lawyer, the inequities of women, particularly women who were working and the child care."
She then opened her law firm while serving on numerous boards throughout the city, including the National Bar Association.
During this time, she fought for civil rights, including serving on President Harry Truman's Committee on Civil Rights.
"Her mission was to bring equity, equality, respect to those marginalized because of race," Alexander-Minter said.
While a portrait of Alexander is hanging on Penn's campus, the city of Philadelphia will install a permanent statue near City Hall to honor the woman of many firsts.
A true trailblazer who never stopped despite the barriers.
"I think when the story is told, and they realize that she kept on — the door may have been closed, but she got through it," Alexander-Minter said. "She would not give up."
