On June 15, 1921, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander became the first African American to gain a doctoral degree in economics when she completed her work at the University of Pennsylvania.
Racial discrimination undermined Alexander’s life as well as the collective memory of her work and breadth of economic thought. But the speeches that she left behind attest to her brilliance and the relevance of her prescient observations to our current political economy. Indeed, she identified economic deprivation as the major obstacle for political, racial and economic equality, all of which remain elusive today. Her solution — full employment job guarantees — may be what we need to finally address persistent job discrimination, involuntary unemployment, inadequate wages and the racial disparities these injustices exacerbate.
Alexander worked toward her doctorate knowing the violence that accompanied Black success. Two weeks before her graduation in 1921, she read reports about how White residents of Tulsa burned down the most prosperous African American community in the country, the Greenwood District, by destroying 35 city blocks, an event that led to African American deaths, arrests and the displacement of some 10,000 African American residents.
A few years earlier, Alexander had seen similar violence and injustice up close in her hometown of Philadelphia, when White mob attacks on African Americans escalated into four days of mayhem in July 1918. By July 30, city police had arrested some 60 Black residents even though Whites were the main instigators of the deadly clashes.
White rage, fueled by the perception of African American social and economic mobility, aimed to stifle Black political, geographic and economic aspirations. As a graduate student, Alexander studied the Great Migration of African Americans who fled suppression and racial terror in the South. They went north seeking voting rights, educational and job opportunities and justice in the courts of law. In her dissertation, Alexander calculated Philadelphia migrants’ living expenses and the degree to which their earnings enabled them to be self-reliant. She found that the majority of migrants were able to earn a living wage, thus countering the perception of longtime Philadelphia residents that migrants were an economic drain on the city.
She graduated with stellar credentials. Her dissertation was published as a supplement to The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and she received employment recommendations from her professors. And yet, no one hired her that year into a position that was commensurate with her level of education. She eventually went back to Penn and earned a law degree in 1927, the first Black woman in the state to do so. Alexander had a distinguished career as an attorney working along with her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, to achieve African American citizenship rights.