Archibald+Alphonso+Alexander

This is Archibald Alphonso Alexander or Archie Born:May 14, 1888. Died: January 4, 1958. He was born in Ottumwa, Iowa

Dad. Price---Occupation: Coachman and Janitor Mom: Mary---Occupation: None

OVERVIEW Not clear on his childhood but he was an athlete and for college he played football. The college he went to Des Moines College and attempted to join the all white football team an was denied. He was transfered to the university of Iowa, where he played football. 1912- Studied bridge design in London, England

Every construction firm in Des Moines rejected his application for employment as an engineer. So took a job, for **twenty-five cents an hour,** as a laborer in the steel shop of the Marsh Engineering Company. There his eagerness and his ambition were not denied. When he resigned two years later to found his own engineering company, he was earning seventy dollars a week as the engineer in charge of bridge construction in Iowa and Minnesota for the March Engineering Company. Starting modestly, often at jobs that attracted few, if any, other bidders, soon took on a white partner, George F. Higbee, with whom he had worked earlier at the Marsh Engineering Company. The partnership lasted from 1917 until 1925, when Higbee was killed in a construction accident. For the next four years ran the company alone, building mostly bridges and viaducts, his specialty, but also apartment buildings and sewage systems. He also built a new heating plant, a new power plant, and a tunnel that went under the Iowa River on the campus of his alma mater in Iowa City., who still encountered prejudice and occasional hostility despite his unblemished engineering record, served as president of the Des Moines chapter of the NAACP and of the local Interracial Commission. In 1929 took on as a junior partner a white engineer, Maurice A. Repass, a former classmate at the University of Iowa. Under the firm name of & Repass, the partners went on to complete projects in nearly every state and to build what //Ebony//magazine called the “nation's most successful interracial business.” The best-known, though not the biggest, projects completed by the firm of & Repass were in the nation's capital: the Tidal Basin Bridge and Seawall, the K Street elevated highway and underpass from Key Bridge to Twenty-Seventh Street, N.W., and the Whitehurst Freeway around Georgetown. He married Audra A. Linzy of Denver in 1913. The couple had one child, who died in early childhood.

Like many black Americans until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932,supported the Republican Party. But unlike most black voters,remained a lifelong Republican, even though it might have been politically as well as economically astute for him to have supported the Democratic Party during its era of dominance, especially since his engineering company did so much public work. But his politics never seemed to hurt his business, and in fact, he was eventually rewarded for his loyalty. He was not just a member of the Republican Party but he was also an active member who twice, in 1932 and in 1940, served as assistant chairman of the Iowa Republican State Committee. In 1952 he was an early supporter of Dwight D. Eisenhower for president. In April 1954, as governor of the Virgin Islands. The appointment was a disaster for all concerned, though, and it may even have hastened his death. Dogmatic, paternalistic, undemocratic, and with an openly stated contempt for the easygoing Virgin Islanders, he was sometimes described as a “Midwestern Babbitt” who brought all the values of small-town America to the Caribbean. He lasted a strife-torn and acrimonious sixteen months before he was pressured to resign in August 1955.

__FUN FACTS__ He helped build [|Whitehurst Freeway], the [|Tidal Basin] [|Bridge], and an extension to the [|Baltimore-Washington Parkway]

In 1934, Alexander was appointed as one of a 12-member commission to investigate the social and economic conditions in [|Haiti]. In 1946, he was awarded an honorary [|Doctor of Engineering] by [|Howard University].

Religion: Episcopalian- other form of **Protestant

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A drawing of the numerous things about Archie