From time to time, people ask me how and why I became and economist. “There aren’t that many black women economists,” they say. “Who were your role models?” The fact is that when I chose to major in economics at Boston College, I didn’t know about other black women economists. I was good in math, but I was an activist, so I figured economics was the way to go.

I’ve been blessed, though, to know one of this century’s great economists, Dr. Phyllis Ann Wallace, who was my mentor and friend. And through her, and through my sorority, I have learned much about the life and legacy of Dr. Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander, the first African American woman to get the Ph.D. degree, which she earned in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. So when people ask about my choices, I tell them I am one of many in a long line of African American women economists. And when we talk bout African American history, I want people to know about these women.

Too often, we limit our historical vision to a couple of figures, and our celebrations become too male and too one-dimensional. We can recite a list of history-making figures, but in our celebrity and sports obsessed society, too few of them are women. If you want to talk African American history, though, you’ve got to talk about these women and women like them, sisters who achieved the highest academic success, only to find themselves stymied and frustrated by our nation’s racism.

Dr. Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander came from an upper middle class black family in Philadelphia. Her uncle, Henry Ossawa Tanner, was an artist who left the United States for Europe where he could more fully explore his craft. Thanks to President Clinton, one of his paintings now hangs in the White House, the first painting by an African American to be so displayed. (Hopefully Baby Bush won’t pull it down. He actually abolished President Clinton’s One America initiative on Tuesday night, but reinstated it Wednesday when the flak started).

Dr. Alexander came from a stellar family, but she was also a stellar scholar. She was the only African American in her Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her degree for a dissertation, “The Migration of the Negro to Philadelphia, 1916-1919”. The dissertation reads well, even today, and it is an insightful, if bourgeoisie, view of black Philadelphia. One of my favorite quotes from the dissertation is “If the Negro church would spend less money on stained glass windows and more on the uplift of its impoverished brethren, then the race would be in much better shape.”

After Sadie Alexander finished her dissertation, she could not find a job in academia. Neither historically black colleges (many did not have economics departments, but Howard University did, though they also had a patriarchal administration that did not embrace women scholars early on), nor the women’s schools were interested in Alexander. So she went to North Carolina to work at North Carolina Mutual Insurance, a black-owned company. Then she returned to Philadelphia, back to the University of Pennsylvania, to go to the law school. She was the first woman (not the first black woman) to be admitted to the Pennsylvania bar. She grew a thriving family law practice, was active in legal and international affairs, and in her sorority, and lived a full life. In learning and writing about her, I have come to know her daughter, Dr. Rae Alexander Minter, who once told me that while her mother experienced discrimination, she was no victim. The more I come to know about Sadie Alexander, the more I agree. We are the victims, not Sadie, because we were robbed of her brilliance and her work in economics, even though she had a rich and fulfilling career in law. Dr. Alexander was almost ninety when she died in 1989.

Had times not changed, we might also have been robbed of Dr. Phyllis Wallace’s work in economics. Dr. Wallace was the first black woman to get the Ph.D. in economics from Yale University. She once said that, perversely, discrimination worked for her. She was not allowed to teach white students as a teaching assistant, so she had a research assistantship that sped her research on her dissertation along. She wrote about prices in the Soviet Union, and spoke or read six languages including Russian, German, and French. After getting her degree, Wallace, too, had difficulty finding employment. She had a job offer from Atlanta University, but preferred to stay north. Yet no university was interested in hiring this extremely talented African American woman.

So she went to Atlanta University, and did teaching and writing there. But historically black colleges had a heavier teaching load than other colleges did, and AU did not have the research facilities for a scholar interested in prices and output in the Soviet Union. So Wallace wrote Adam Clayton Powell, describing herself as “a Negro economist desirous of federal government employment”, and ended up working at the CIA. Nobody knew. Not her family, not her friends. But she happily did research that could have been described as spying. And she might have spent her career there but for the civil rights movement.

San Francisco’s own Aileen Hernandez found Phyllis Wallace and asked her to come work for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She was the first research director, the architect of the AT&T consent decree, a decree that brought more women and people of color into the highest paid jobs at the phone company. From EEOC, Wallace went to work with Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, who did the doll studies that helped decide the Brown v. Board of Education case. She then went to work at MIT, becoming one of the school’s first African American professors, and the only one in the business school. There, she put her hands on me and a group of economics students, and guided us through our rigorous studies.

Wallace studied the labor market, and patterns of work. She was the first African American to head the Industrial Relations Research Association. Upon her retirement from MIT, she joined a series of corporate boards, including the Stop and Shop Corporation and State Street Bank. She also joined the Board of Directors of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. She was influential in getting the museum to take its Nubian collection out of crates and onto the exhibit floor. She also developed programs that allowed Boston public school students to see the Nubian exhibit so, as she said, the could understand where black folks came from.

Dr. Wallace died in 1993, days before Bill Clinton was sworn in as President of the United States. She lives on through her work, and in the memories of the thousands whose lives she touched. Both Wallace and Alexander represent some of the hidden sheroes in black history. I have always been proud to share a profession with them.

Sun Reporter Newspaper 
February 7, 2001

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