Frederick Douglas Alexander (February 21, 1910 – April 13, 1980) was an American businessman, civil rights activist, and politician from Charlotte, North Carolina.
The state of North Carolina had passed measures at the turn of the 20th century to raise barriers to voter registration, and excluded African Americans for decades from the political system.
Restrictions had begun to ease in cities such as Charlotte even before national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s.
His father was a prominent African-American businessman and district manager of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and owner of the Alexander Funeral Home.
The state had passed a new constitution in 1900 that raised barriers to voter registration in order to disenfranchise blacks, whether educated or not.
During the Great Depression, when some opportunities opened for African Americans, Alexander worked to gain hiring of black city police officers and US mail carriers.
While the police and postal positions were nominally part of the civil service of the city and federal government, Charlotte had managed to restrict them to whites.
[2] In 1948 Alexander was a founding member and served as executive secretary for the Citizens Committee for Political Action in Charlotte.
[5] Alexander's initial proposal to City Council to remove the fence resulted in their deciding to have a vote on the issue.
It was approved on January 6, 1969, when one councilman was absent and Mayor Stan Brookshire cast the decided vote in favor of the proposal.
His efforts had "initiated a symbolic gesture that said not only to black Charlotteans, but whites as well, that the barriers of segregation belong to a bygone era.
Alexander also gained city council approval to construct a fire station for northwest Charlotte, a majority-African American neighborhood that had been underserved.
He was also part of the NAACP, the North Carolina Good Neighbor Council, Governor's Committee on Law and Order, and was president of the Mint Museum of Art from 1978 to 1979.