The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts by Virginia L. Summey (review)

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• The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts by Virginia L. Summey
• Janet Allured

The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts. By Virginia L. Summey. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. [x], 193. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6193-2; cloth, $120.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6192-5.)

This book’s dive into the public and private life of Judge Elreta Melton Alexander of Greensboro, North Carolina, reminds us how the politics of respectability sometimes translated into civil rights and feminist activism on the local level. For many well-educated Black women like Alexander, participating in public demonstrations such as pickets and boycotts—with the attendant risk of arrest and imprisonment—was unseemly and not an option. Instead, she and others of her class joined service organizations like the Links, defied segregation customs, and quietly integrated white professional spaces as they sought to uplift their communities. As author Virginia L. Summey explains, “Through performance and everyday acts of resistance, she [Alexander] used her career as a platform to create change for African Americans within the law” (p. 56). This book, then, broadens our understanding of what civil rights activism looked like.

It also speaks to the conundrum that domestic violence caused well-educated women of color. For those who practiced the politics of respectability, divorce was not an option (or so they believed). Alexander and her husband, Girardeau “Tony” Alexander, a successful Black doctor, discussed divorce. But the judge stayed in her marriage to avoid damaging both her and her family’s reputation, though on more than one occasion she barely escaped with her life. [End Page 644]

Summey resurrects this unsung heroine through masterful research into campus newspapers, local newspapers, trial transcripts, Judge Alexander’s files at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Alexander’s unpublished book of poetry, interviews conducted by others, and Summey’s own interviews with those who knew the judge. Born in 1919 to a family lacking material wealth but possessing strong values of education and racial uplift, Alexander went on to achieve several significant firsts. She became, in 1945, the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School; in 1947, the first African American woman to practice law in North Carolina; and in 1968, the first Black woman elected a district court judge. She also became part of the first integrated law firm in the South.

Summey attributes Alexander’s accomplishments to her family and to her upbringing in East Greensboro, North Carolina, which provided greater educational opportunities to African American children than did most areas of the South. Her troubled marriage was a factor, too. Her husband’s alcoholism, violence, and infidelity propelled her to get an advanced education out of state. The couple’s lack of intimacy and frequent separations gave her space and energy to concentrate on her career (their only child had severe mental illness and was eventually institutionalized).

Meanwhile, Summey points to Alexander’s many ways of creating change that benefited the Black community. Alexander defied segregation customs in the courtroom and in courthouses, advised African Americans considering civil rights actions, and assisted Black professionals by filing suit against entities that discriminated against them. Aware of the disproportionately harsh sentences Black men received, she challenged a flawed jury system, ultimately leading to a change in Guilford County’s jury selection process. Finally, she focused on rehabilitation rather than jail in her sentencing. Relatively popular for someone so pathbreaking, she was disappointed when she ran for a seat on the state supreme court in 1974 and lost to a white fire extinguisher salesman with a high school degree. Discouraged, she retired from the bench at age sixty-two and reentered private practice.

The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts is part of the growing literature about the first generation of female attorneys and judges in the United States. It should be required reading for historians interested in American women’s history, Black history, civil rights, and the South in general. Good on context, highly readable, and compact, it will be of interest to larger audiences as well.

Janet Allured University of Arkansas Copyright...