Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander

Sadie Tanner Mossell was born in Philadelphia on the second of January 1898, into one of the most prominent Black families of the late-nineteenth-century United States. Her grandfather Benjamin Tucker Tanner was an AME bishop and editor of the Christian Recorder; her uncle Henry Ossawa Tanner was the leading African American painter of his generation; her father Aaron Albert Mossell II was the first African American to earn a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

She took her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1918 (Phi Beta Kappa). She entered the Penn Wharton economics doctoral program and completed her doctorate in 1921 — the first African American woman to earn a PhD in economics from any American university and one of the first three African American women to earn any American PhD.

Her dissertation, The Standard of Living Among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia (1921), was an empirical study of the urban Black migration that would become the demographic foundation of twentieth-century African American life. The work was published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1921 — among the first major scholarly publications by a Black woman economist.

She returned to Penn for her J.D., which she earned in 1927 — the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the first to practice law in Pennsylvania. She practiced law at her husband's firm Alexander & Alexander in Philadelphia for the next sixty-two years, served as Assistant City Solicitor of Philadelphia from 1928 to 1930, and chaired the National Bar Association's Family Law Section.

She advised President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights (1946-47), chaired President Carter's White House Conference on Aging (1979), and served on the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations for thirty years.

She died in Philadelphia on the first of November 1989, age ninety-one.

She is honored here as the economist-attorney who broke two Penn ceilings six years apart.