Background
William Winton Alexander was born on July 15, 1884 near Morrisville, Missouri, United States. He was the son of William Baxter Alexander, a farmer, and Arabella A. Winton, a former schoolteacher.
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William Winton Alexander was born on July 15, 1884 near Morrisville, Missouri, United States. He was the son of William Baxter Alexander, a farmer, and Arabella A. Winton, a former schoolteacher.
Alexander received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Scarritt-Morrisville College in 1908, and later followed the family tradition of Methodism and studied theology at Vanderbilt University, where he received the Bachelor of Divinity in 1912.
Alexander was ordained to the ministry of the Methodist Church, South, in 1911, and he held pastorates in Nashville (1911-1916) and Murfreesboro, Tennessee (1916-1917). His pastoral experience aroused his interest in the problems of race and poverty. In 1917 he left the ministry to work with the Young Men's Christian Association War Work Council in Georgia. In 1919 he took a leading part in founding the Commission on Interracial Cooperation with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia; he served as director during its twenty-five-year existence. His object was to bring together the educated people of the South, both white and black, to consult on community affairs and to solve racial problems. The information on the activities of the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, gathered by the commission in communities throughout the South, was turned over to the New York World and provided much of the evidence for that newspaper's nationally influential exposé of the Klan.
While still acting as executive director of the Interracial Commission, Alexander did much to initiate and guide the program of fellowships established by the Rosenwald Fund for talented young southerners, both black and white, for advanced study, usually outside the South. At the same time he took an interest in the colleges and universities for blacks in Atlanta, and he was one of the planners and the acting president of Dillard University in New Orleans during the early 1930s, when the modern university was being created. The network of personal contacts and goodwill that Alexander and the Interracial Commission built up in communities throughout the South formed the basis of his strength. Yet he always found financial dependence on local communities constraining, and he was happiest and most effective when he gained the support of foundations--notably those associated with the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Rosenwald, and Stern families--for the organizations for which he worked.
Community effort and goodwill were not enough, as Alexander recognized in the desperate economic conditions in the 1930s. His concern for the tragic plight of southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers, both black and white, led him to look to Roosevelt's New Deal for help. In 1935 Alexander went to Washington as assistant administrator of the Resettlement Administration under Rexford Guy Tugwell. On Tugwell's resignation in 1936, he was appointed administrator and when the Resettlement Administration was succeeded by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, Alexander became its first head. In the work of these agencies the interests and personalities of Tugwell and Alexander were complementary. An extraordinarily stimulating source of ideas, Tugwell was chiefly interested in the classification and long-term planning for the best possible use of all land. Alexander admired Tugwell's vision, but his own gift was for human relationships and his main concern was with the immediate problem of the rehabilitation of those farmers who were in the most desperate straits--in the Great Plains dust bowl as well as in the South--and to whom such major agencies as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration offered little help. Authorities differ on the actual roles of Alexander and Tugwell, and Tugwell himself has taken the view that his original ideas of the goals of the Resettlement Administration were much altered under FSA. That the FSA remained viable during Alexander's administration was in part owing to his personality. He recognized that it was hopeless to expect support from most of the major farm organizations, but that their neutrality was essential to the FSA's survival. Edward A. O'Neal, the president of the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation, which began its major attack on the FSA in 1940, maintained that he could get along with Will Alexander but not with his successor. It was, however, the votes of a group of senators from the Midwest that finally killed the FSA. Alexander was never able to come to terms with this group, especially Senator Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois.
After his resignation from the FSA on June 30, 1940, Alexander became vice-president of the Rosenwald Fund (1940-1948), and advisor to various agencies of the federal government, especially on the problems of minorities. Alexander's choice of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as his home upon retirement is symbolic. Although he had come from the same milieu as the romantic, backward-looking Nashville agrarians, he had always encouraged and shared the lively interest in hard facts and the hopeful vision of the southern regionalists associated with the University of North Carolina. His aim in the Interracial Commission had been "to change the racial climate of the South. "
He died in Chapel Hill.
Alexander accomplished much in creating a climate that would make changes in race relations possible in the southern region as a whole, during the interwar period. In 1926 he was the first ever winner of the prestigious Gold medal for distinguished achievements in race relations of the Harmon Foundation awards.
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Alexander was an ordained minister in the Methodist Church.
Alexander was a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration.
In October 1914 Alexander married Mabelle A. Kinkead; they had three sons.
