About the age of three he, his mother, and his younger brother was sold to Robert McAlpine in Coosa County, Alabama.
In 1855, Robert McAlpine died and his property dispersed, with William separated from his mother and moved to Talladega County, Alabama.
His new owner, Augustus McAlpine, was a doctor, and William remained with the family until the end of the American Civil War in 1865.
Here he was able to receive a basic education in the company with white children who were taught at home, and learned to read and write.
A concurrent white convention recommended the black Baptists give the money they had raised for the university to their care and not to undertake the project alone, but McAlpine convinced the convention that it should not follow the advice of the white group and to establish the institution themselves.
[1] At the 1874 convention, a board of trustees was elected for the body consisting of McAlpine, Holland Thompson, Henry J. Europe, Charles Octavia Boothe, and Alexander Butler.
In the fall of that, year the State convention was in Eufaula, where a decision was made to purchase the old Fair Grounds of Selma, Alabama, as the schools location.
[1] As a member of the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention in 1895, McAlpine was a member of a committee put forward by Albert W. Pegues to try to unify the group with the American National Baptist Convention and the Baptist National Educational Convention along with Pegues, Andrew J. Stokes, Joseph Endom Jones, Wesley G. Parks, J. H. Frank, A. Hubbs, A. S. Jackson, and Jacob R. Bennett, all from southern states.
[6] One daughter of McAlpine was Ethel, who worked as a high school principal and an instructor at Selma University.