When political leaders held a press conference in July to condemn the assassination attempt of Donald Trump in Butler County, they made a poignant choice of location, next to a 12-foot-tall bronze sculpture, five granite pillars and a 19th-century ballot box outside of City Hall.

The Octavius V. Catto statue, since its unveiling in 2017, has become a reminder of more than just the realities of political violence in this country. Its beauty and sheer physicality are a symbol of the struggle for racial equality in this city and beyond, to which Catto contributed mightily as a businessman, baseball pioneer, educator, and civil rights activist who fiercely advocated for the 15th Amendment — only to be murdered on the first Election Day in Philadelphia after it was enacted.

But the story of the statue itself is another reminder of that struggle too. Currently, it’s the one and only statue of a real-life Black American on public property in Philadelphia.

“The city has over 1,000 statues, and it was only in the 21st century that we had the first statue of an African American male in a city that’s over 40 percent African American,” says civic leader and businessman Osagie Imasogie, a significant donor and fundraiser on the project, which was a public-private collaboration. “Physical representation matters.”

Soon, the Catto installation will not be alone. On November 4, the City announced its latest effort to honor the contributions of Black Philadelphians, commissioning a statue of lawyer and civil rights icon Sadie T.M. Alexander, which will eventually go outside the Municipal Services Building. (A privately funded statue of Marian Anderson — to be installed outside the Academy of Music — is also underway.)

The Alexander statue will signify a new beginning at Thomas Paine Plaza, which became the site of tense protests in 2020 surrounding the statue of former Police Commissioner and Mayor Frank Rizzo. After removing that statue (which is still being challenged in the courts), the City later cleared the plaza of other landmarks as well, including the Your Move public art (the oversized game pieces). In 2023, the City began a $20 million renovation of the plaza that triggered a Percent for Art project, the end result of which will be the Alexander memorial.

The City insists that replacing a notorious symbol of racism in the city with a civil rights icon is mostly a coincidence. Mayor Cherelle Parker has been advocating for an Alexander statue since at least 2018, and the renovations made for an “obvious opportunity” to do it, says Marguerite Anglin, the public art director of Creative Philadelphia, also known as the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy. The project, which issued a call for artists on November 18, will be the first major piece of public art commissioned under Mayor Parker.

“This being a priority of the new administration, the renovations present a unique opportunity to honor a trailblazing Philadelphian in a newly renovated space,” says Anglin.

Still, many Philadelphians will no doubt feel that Alexander is a fitting replacement for the Rizzo statue. Her long list of contributions to the city and the country is staggering. Alexander became the first Black person in the United States to earn a PhD in economics in 1921; she was the first woman to graduate from Penn law school six years later, an assistant city solicitor, a shaper of the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter, a presidential appointee, secretary of the National Bar Association, a mother of two, and much more.

Imosogie, who also chairs the Penn Carey Law School, says that he’s proud to have an alumna receive such a special recognition, but also believes it’ll be important for the long-term psyche of the city.

“Sadie Alexander was engaged in the same struggle as Catto, but engaged in it from an academic perspective and a legal perspective,” says Imasogie. “When you learn that in the 1920s, in the midst of one of the most horrible periods of misogyny and social environments for people of color and women, and she accomplished what she did, it puts into context the current struggle, both in terms of how long the struggle is and that the struggle continues even now.”

Who was Sadie Alexander?

As I was searching for a quintessential story about Alexander, who was born in 1898 and died at the age of 91, I decided to reach out to Fasaha Traylor, the co-author of They Carried Us, a book chronicling the lives of 95 Black women who made an indelible imprint on Philadelphia.

Traylor gave me an anecdote I hadn’t read about anywhere else, one that requires a bit of context: Alexander was not only a trailblazing lawyer herself, but was also married to one — Raymond Pace Alexander, a two-term City Councilman with an equally long list of accomplishments. In the 1960s, Raymond began to explore a sale of his namesake law firm, where Sadie had worked for more than 30 years and had helped build.

“The incident that I think of most when I think of her is the letter she had to write to her husband, when he was going to sell and not consult her,” Traylor says. “She had to write to say, No, hold up.” With a grin I could hear through the phone, Traylor adds, “she even threatened to sue him.”

In what was by all accounts a loving marriage — one that was characterized by rare intellectual brilliance on the part of both partners — the gender roles of the day were still present, according to Traylor.

“It’s very fascinating to me that the parts of her life that had to do with her being a woman are so much lesser known than the parts of her life that had to do with her being a Black woman,” she says. “It was really the two together. How useful the concept of intersectionality would have been to describe the dilemmas she faced, but we didn’t have that language then.”

Intersectional in her lived experience and interdisciplinary in her pursuits, Alexander lived a fabled life. She was born in Philadelphia to a family of highly educated professionals, including her father, Aaron A. Mossell, the first Black graduate of Penn’s Law School, and an uncle who was the first to graduate from Penn’s Medical School.

At the age of 23, Alexander became the third Black woman to earn a PhD of any discipline (the first in economics) and then enrolled in law school a few years later. In 1927, Alexander was elected to the Penn Law Review in spite of efforts by the dean of the school, who tried to prevent her from serving. After graduating, she passed the Pennsylvania Bar and would remain the only Black woman to practice law in Philadelphia until 1949.

Over the course of her life, Alexander opened doors for others, serving as a role model for generations of Black lawyers in Philly. Those ranks included Phoebe Haddon, lawyer and former chancellor of Rutgers-Camden and her late husband Frank McClellan. “We were newcomers to Philadelphia, and she set the stage for what it meant to be civically involved,” says Haddon. “We followed in her footsteps of being both lawyers and law professors.”

Alexander’s list of firsts and contributions to the legal community continued until her retirement at the age of 84, but they alone don’t define her legacy. In between stints working at her husband’s law firm and starting her own, Alexander served in government roles at the local and federal level, including a seat on President Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights and the City’s Commission on Human Relations.

Traylor, for one, hopes that the public art project will capture the full force of her contributions, and how they were all inter-related. “One part of her legacy that deserves more attention is her PhD in economics and her specific focus on family law,” she says. During the period of the Great Migration and beyond, Alexander worked on writing and enforcing wills among Black people, seeing the importance of wealth transfer. “I think that part of the story is really important, because it gave her a lens through which to view the horrific circumstances of the Black working class, and particularly Black women.”

For all of those reasons, and more, Traylor says that the statue is “way overdue.”

The process

On November 7, more than 50 members of the public attended an online kickoff meeting for the project. “There was a lot of excitement for the plans to celebrate this pioneering civil rights activist,” says Anglin, public art director of Creative Philadelphia. “People expressed a desire for this statue to inspire and educate young people, so that younger generations will know about her life and service.”

Creative Philadelphia has also received public input through a series of online surveys, asking questions like which aspects of Alexander’s life should be featured in the statue and what feelings it should invoke. That feedback will be given to the selection committee, which includes one of Alexander’s daughters and 16 other legal, civic and artistic leaders.

The recent call for artists will culminate with five finalists being selected for the next phase of the project. In the spring, those artists will present their visions at a public meeting to invite additional feedback, which the City says will inform the selection of the winning submission.

Although it’s too early in the process for an expected date of completion, the statue will eventually be the centerpiece of the new-look plaza, which will include more green space, seating and lighting than before.

“It is very symbolic for the statue of Sadie T.M. Alexander to sit in front of the Municipal Services Building,” says Anglin, noting Alexander’s stint working in a prominent legal role for the City. “It only makes sense for her to stand there with city workers, right across from City Hall.”

Imasogie hopes the statue will serve as a bridge between everyday Philadelphians and their government, inspiring them to vote and participate: “It puts into context the sacrifice that people like Catto and Alexander gave to get us to where we are, and how you disrespect that sacrifice if you’re not an active participant in our democracy.”

Here, you can find the Call For Artists: Dr. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Statue with all the details you’ll need to get involved. The deadline to submit your qualifications is December 30, 2024, at 11:59pm ET.

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