Clifford L. Alexander Jr., a Harlem-raised, Ivy League-educated lawyer who was a crusading chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the late 1960s and later served as the first Black secretary of the Army, died July 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. His wife, Adele Logan Alexander, confirmed the death but did not provide a specific cause.
Guided by powerful mentors in academia, law and government, Mr. Alexander was the first Black student-body president at Harvard University, the first Black partner at the elite Washington law firm Arnold & Porter and spent his career seeking to shatter racial boundaries with statesmanlike calm. He seemed destined for elective office but lost a close race for D.C. mayor in 1974, shortly after the city won home rule.
Mr. Alexander came to Washington in 1963 on the recommendation of McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard dean who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as national security adviser. Mr. Alexander helped shepherd the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 and became Lyndon B. Johnson’s personal consultant on civil rights before he became EEOC chairman in 1967.
The EEOC, created under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had no mandate for legal action but could make recommendations based on its investigations of employment discrimination aimed at racial and religious minorities. Mr. Alexander was the third chairman and first Black official to hold the post.
He immediately launched investigations into the textile and drug industries as well as utility companies and labor unions, and demonstrated the minuscule numbers of minorities in the white-collar ranks of major corporations.
At a congressional hearing in March 1969, Mr. Alexander testified about rampant discrimination against Blacks and Mexican Americans in Hollywood. Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen (R-Ill.) called the hearing “a carnival” and lambasted the EEOC for using its power to target an industry that had “given employment to hundreds of Negroes.”
“We didn’t intend for the work-givers of this nation — business and industry — to be harassed,” Dirksen said.
Mr. Alexander was unflappable in his response. “It’s important that the law be enforced,” he said, adding that the harassment of African Americans far exceeded that of business executives.
Irked, the veteran lawmaker replied that “this punitive harassment has got to stop, or I’ll go to the highest authority in this government to get somebody fired.”
Shortly thereafter, the Nixon administration announced its intention to install a Republican commission chairman. Mr. Alexander resigned, citing a “crippling lack of administration support” and a Justice Department unresponsive to his requests for help in enforcing racial discrimination. EEOC member William H. Brown III, also African American, succeeded him.
Edward C. Sylvester, an African American who became the first director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, told The Washington Post at the time that Mr. Alexander “gave the commission some life and the legislation some meaning. He grabbed the only thing they had at the time, which was the right to hold hearings, and he did an extraordinary job.”
After leaving government, Mr. Alexander joined Arnold & Porter, where he practiced corporate and discrimination law and recruited new hires from Howard University’s law school. He also hosted a syndicated TV public affairs show, “Cliff Alexander: Black on White.”
In his mayoral race, his opponent in the Democratic primary was Walter E. Washington, the District’s presidentially appointed mayor-commissioner since 1967 and the first Black chief executive of a major U.S. city. Mr. Alexander, who had worked on a home rule bill when he served under Johnson, ran on his civil rights and public service records and garnered 47 percent of the vote, but Washington bested him and became the first directly elected mayor of the city in more than a century.
Mr. Alexander returned to legal work until President Jimmy Carter tapped him in 1977 as Army secretary. His military experience was scant — he had served briefly as a private after law school — but his appointment as the first Black civilian head of a U.S. military branch was hailed as a milestone.
His survivors include his wife, Adele Logan, a Fieldston and Radcliffe College graduate who taught history at George Washington University, and two children, Elizabeth Alexander of Manhattan, a poet who chaired Yale’s African American studies department and is now president of the arts-supporting Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Mark Alexander, who became the first Black dean of Villanova University law school, of Radnor, Pa.; and seven grandchildren.
