[1] His parents, like many African Americans in the 1860s and 1870s, had left the rural South looking for economic opportunities and an escape from the violence that accompanied the Jim Crow segregation system in place there.

[7] Later, looking back on his time at the Opera House, Alexander said that it had "opened a new world for me", and he credited that environment with giving him "some of the smoothness and culture which characterizes my later years".

[18] In a new trial before the same judge, Thomas was found not guilty, which Alexander's biographer, David A. Canton, described as "a landmark in Pennsylvania legal history".

[20] Around this time, Alexander began to identify with the black intellectual "New Negro" movement, which advocated self-help, racial pride, and protest against injustice.

[27] With the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Alexander negotiated with the school board, attempting to end the boycott, but the stalemate continued into 1933.

[28] Tensions increased as the state Attorney General, William A. Schnader, ordered the black parents prosecuted for refusing to send their children to school.

[27] The following year, the state passed a strengthened equal rights bill that covered all public accommodations, including schools, and allowed private lawyers to sue segregated businesses.

[33] Alexander rose to national prominence in the black legal community after the Berwyn case, and he began to speak around the country at NBA events, serving as the organization's president from 1933 to 1935.

[41] In 1949, the Supreme Court of New Jersey granted the men a new trial but prohibited the CRC from representing any of the defendants because they found that the group had unfairly influenced jury pools through the news media.

[42] In the 1951 re-trial, Alexander established that the police had manufactured evidence in order to secure a quick conviction and quiet public concerns about the crime wave then rippling through Trenton.

[44] Though not a complete victory, Alexander had demonstrated his skill as a lawyer and saved the lives of his clients, while managing to distance himself from the CRC and other communist groups, an important consideration in the Cold War atmosphere.

Nonetheless, he saw the Republicans as the best chance for African American advancement in the city and lobbied the party leaders to nominate a black lawyer—preferably him—for one of the judicial seats up for election in 1937.

[47] He found little support, and lost the primary election to the three party-endorsed candidates: Byron A. Milner, Clare G. Fenerty, and John Robert Jones.

[50] Sadie Alexander had followed her husband's political shift to the Democrats and remained there, and in 1946 President Harry S. Truman appointed her to his Committee on Civil Rights.

[58] Democrats swept nine of the ten council districts and elected Clark mayor, ending 67 years of Republican rule in the city.

[61] In 1953, Alexander introduced a resolution in council demanding that the then all-white Girard College admit black students, or else lose its tax-exempt status.

[62] The case wended its way through the courts, led by civil rights activist Cecil B. Moore; the school eventually desegregated, but not until 1968, long after Alexander had left City Council.

In 1954, he successfully opposed the efforts of fellow Democrats James Tate and Michael J. Towey to weaken the civil service reforms of the new charter.

[65] Two years later, Alexander remained opposed, but the amendments' proponents found the required two-thirds vote in Council to make it on to the ballot for popular approval.

[73] In Alexander's first year on the court, he was disturbed by the high number of black defendants he saw and sought to remedy the problem by creating an alternate probation system for first-time offenders called the "Spiritual Rehabilitation Program", with funding and logistical assistance coming from local churches and synagogues.

[74] He also found himself dragged back into the political realm when Republicans demanded that a grand jury be convened to investigate Democratic corruption in City Hall; Alexander rejected their petition.

[75] Alexander continued to be active as a civil rights leader but clashed with younger activists over the methods best suited to achieving their goals.

In 1962, for example, while Alexander urged increased black representation on the Philadelphia Council for Community Advancement, he disagreed with NAACP branch president Cecil B. Moore's call for a boycott of corporate donors to the group.

[76] While supporting Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil disobedience campaigns in the South in 1964, he believed some measures hurt the cause by alienating white voters; he called on black leaders to "cease the needless demonstrations, stall-ins, uncalled lie downs especially in the North which bring discredit upon us".

[77] In 1966, he condemned the Black Power movement as "a hazardous and meaningless catch-phrase which is as dangerous and divisive for the Negro as the white racism which we have opposed for so long".

[80] Nevertheless, according to Canton, by the 1970s young blacks viewed Alexander and his generation of civil rights leaders as "out of touch and too dependent on the white elite".

[83] Leon Sullivan officiated Alexander's funeral at Philadelphia's First Baptist Church, after which the judge was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

[83] In 2007, the University of Pennsylvania endowed the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professorship, devoted to the study of civil rights and race relations.