Adele Logan Alexander
*Adele Logan Alexander was born on this date in 1938. She is an author and Black professor of history.
Born Adele Logan in New York City, she was an only child of Arthur C. Logan and Wenonah Bond and the only granddaughter of Educator Adela Hunt. Logan attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1959. She married Clifford Alexander Jr. in 1959; their daughter, Elizabeth Alexander, is a poet and writer.
Alexander earned her Ph.D. from Howard University in 1994, after beginning her doctoral work at age 46. She is a professor of American history at George Washington University. In 2009, she was named to the National Endowment for the Humanities.
As an author, Alexander is known for her books on African American families, including members of her family, which she chronicled in Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist's Story from the Jim Crow South about her grandmother, the suffragist Adella Hunt Logan. In Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926, Alexander chronicles the transition from a working low-income family to the middle class from the American Civil War to the Jazz Age.
Her book Parallel Worlds describes the life of the diplomat William Henry Hunt and his wife Ida Gibbs, a leading figure in the Pan-Africanism movement in the 1910s. In 2020, Alexander was within a group of women talking with The New York Times about the 100-year mark of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution; during the discussion, she shared her thoughts on the actions taken by women to obtain the right to vote and her memories of going to vote with her mother as a young child.
2000 Alexander won the 2000 Black Caucus Literary Award from the American Library Association. In 2003, she received a lifetime achievement award from the African American Historical and Genealogical Society.
