Adele Logan Alexander

Civic leader and historian Adele Logan Alexander was born on January 26, 1938 in New York City, New York to Wenonah Bond Logan and Dr. Arthur Courtney Logan. She attended the Ethical Culture-Fieldston School in New York City, graduating from high school in 1955. She received her B.A. degree in architectural sciences in 1959 from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts and her Ph.D. degree in history in 1994 from Howard University in Washington D.C.

Alexander worked for several years in landscape architecture and graphic design following her undergraduate studies, through 1963. In 1970, she was hired as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Adlai Stevenson III; and, in 1974, she managed the Washington D.C. mayoral campaign of her husband, Clifford Alexander, Jr. Then, in 1977, she worked in fundraising and development for the Capital Children’s Museum in Washington D.C. Four years later, she and her husband co-founded the corporate consulting firm Alexander and Associates.

While Alexander was earning her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history at Howard University, she taught classes at the University of Maryland, at Howard University, and at Trinity College. In 1994, she was hired to teach African American and women’s history at George Washington University and was promoted to professor in 2000. Alexander’s first book, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1978–1878, was published in 1991. Her other publications include Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846–1926 and Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin. In 2019, Yale University Press published Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist's Story from the Jim Crow South, a scholarly reconstruction of the life of Alexander’s suffragist grandmother, Adella Hunt Logan.

Alexander served as a member of the Washington D.C. Board of Higher Education and the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, starting in 2010, as an appointee of President Barack Obama. She received the Black Caucus Literary Award from the American Library Association in 2000 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the African American Historical and Genealogical Society in 2003. Alexander retired from teaching in 2015.

Alexander was married to Clifford Alexander, Jr. until his death in 2022. They have two children, Elizabeth Alexander and Mark Clifford Alexander, and seven grandchildren.

Alexander resides in New York, New York.

Adele Logan Alexander was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 17, 2023.