Clifford L. Alexander Jr., whose lengthy profession as a number one adviser to Democratic presidents ranged from working behind the scenes on landmark laws just like the Voting Rights Act to high-profile roles like serving as the primary Black secretary of the Military, died on Sunday at his house in Manhattan. He was 88.
His daughter, the poet Elizabeth Alexander, mentioned the trigger was coronary heart failure.
Mr. Alexander was a lifelong devotee of the guarantees held out by President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Nice Society, particularly the concept that authorities may do a lot to alleviate racial and financial inequality. And he was among the many era of younger Black leaders who, within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, introduced the civil rights motion from the streets into the equipment of the federal authorities.
As chairman of the Equal Employment Alternative Fee underneath President Johnson and, briefly, his successor, Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Alexander turned what had been a comparatively powerless company right into a central participant in preventing office discrimination. He resigned after Nixon demoted him from chairman to commissioner, criticizing the president for “a crippling lack of administration assist.”
Later, because the secretary of the Military underneath Jimmy Carter, he opened the doorways for Black officers to rise to the rank of normal, together with a very promising younger colonel named Colin Powell.
“Cliff noticed his position as secretary of the Military as a key extension of the civil rights motion, and he inaugurated and enforced insurance policies that had been spectacularly efficient in attaining his objective,” the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a longtime pal, mentioned in a cellphone interview. “The truth that the USA army is, maybe, probably the most built-in establishment in our society might be traced to the foresight of Clifford Alexander.”
Mr. Alexander was among the many few Black leaders to be brazenly vital of President Invoice Clinton, arguing that he engaged with race superficially and solely when it was politically expedient. However he was a significant supporter of Barack Obama, each as an adviser and as a marketing campaign surrogate throughout Mr. Obama’s run for the White Home in 2008.
Coincidentally, his daughter, who was then a professor of poetry at Yale and a longtime pal of the Obamas, learn her poem “Reward Track for the Day” at Mr. Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
“Cliff was an American authentic — a civil rights trailblazer whose eyes had been by no means shut to injustice however whose coronary heart was all the time open,” Michelle Obama mentioned in an announcement. “He was like a father to me and an inspiration to Barack. We admired the way in which he fought and discovered from the way in which he led.”
Clifford Leopold Alexander Jr. was born on Sept. 21, 1933, in Harlem. His father was a Jamaican immigrant who managed the Riverton Homes, a sprawling residential improvement in Harlem financed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance coverage Firm. Not like different Met Life developments, together with Stuyvesant City-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, Riverton was built-in, and most of its residents had been Black.
Mr. Alexander’s mom, Edith (McAllister) Alexander, was additionally energetic within the metropolis’s life and politics. She served a number of mayors as an adviser on civil rights. She is believed to have been the primary Black feminine elector at a Democratic Nationwide Conference, in 1948.
After attending the Fieldston Faculty, a personal highschool within the Bronx, Mr. Alexander studied authorities at Harvard, the place he was elected the primary Black president of the scholar council. He graduated in 1955 and obtained his regulation diploma from Yale in 1958.
Again in New York, he labored for a time as an assistant district lawyer and because the govt director of Harlem Youth Alternatives Limitless, an antipoverty group based by Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark.
He married Adele Logan, a historian, in 1959. Together with their daughter, she survives him, as do their son, Mark, and 7 grandchildren.
Each of Mr. Alexander’s youngsters went on to profitable careers: Elizabeth is now the president of the Mellon Basis, and Mark is the dean of the Charles Widger Faculty of Regulation at Villanova College.
Mr. Alexander arrived in Washington in 1963 to serve on the employees of the Nationwide Safety Council underneath President John F. Kennedy. Virtually instantly, he was additionally performing as an off-the-cuff adviser on race, and Kennedy despatched him as an observer to the March on Washington.
‘’The White Home was in a state of clear apprehension,” Mr. Alexander instructed The New York Occasions in 2003. “If you happen to get ready just like the one I used to be in, you will have a accountability to say to the individuals in energy what you consider race. So I went out to see what was occurring.”
Not lengthy after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson introduced Mr. Alexander into his circle to behave as a liaison to the civil rights motion and, particularly, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Alexander quickly turned Johnson’s closest adviser on race relations, entrusted with lining up assist within the Black group for the president’s legislative priorities and serving to shepherd Black nominees via Congress, together with Robert C. Weaver because the secretary of housing and concrete improvement and Thurgood Marshall as a Supreme Court docket justice.
Even after Johnson appointed Mr. Alexander chairman of the Equal Employment Alternative Fee in 1967, he continued to depend on him as a conduit to the Black group. When Dr. King was assassinated and violence erupted throughout Washington, Johnson despatched Mr. Alexander into the streets to fulfill with Black leaders and to evaluate the harm.
After leaving the Equal Employment Alternative Fee, Mr. Alexander turned the primary Black individual to attain the rank of companion at a significant Washington regulation agency when he joined Arnold & Porter. He hosted a syndicated TV speak present, “Black on White,” from 1972 to 1976, and ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Washington in 1974.
As secretary of the Military, he was charged with persevering with to rebuild the armed forces after the catastrophe of the Vietnam Warfare. It was a herculean activity that concerned reorienting the Military round volunteers, ending racial discrimination and bringing in additional girls.
His time in that submit, which resulted in 1981, was his final official stint in authorities service. However he continued to function an off-the-cuff adviser to politicians and policymakers. He served on a number of company boards and, within the late Nineteen Nineties, because the interim chairman and chief govt of the advisory agency Dun & Bradstreet.
He and his spouse based a consulting agency, Alexander & Associates, that suggested main companies on how you can cut back racial inequality. Amongst their most notable shoppers was Main League Baseball, which they helped deal with racial disparities within the group’s entrance places of work.
Amongst his tidbits of recommendation was the next, on the significance of getting individuals to concentrate to you.
“Only a few senators or members of Congress do issues simply because it’s proper, or we’d have a much better world than we have now at this time,” he mentioned in a 2017 interview for the Kunhardt Movie Basis. However, he added, “If you happen to can present anyone why it’s of their curiosity, they could do some issues.”
