The First Black Woman to Earn a Ph.D. in Economics Was Delta Sigma Theta’s First National President

Did you know that the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in economics in the United States was also the first National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.? Her name was Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, and in 1921 she earned that doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania at just 23 years old.

Born in Philadelphia on January 2, 1898, Alexander was a pioneering Black professional and civil rights activist whose list of firsts spanned decades. In 1921 she became the first African American woman in the country to receive a Ph.D. in economics. In 1927 she became the first Black woman to earn a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and she went on to become the first Black woman to practice law in the state of Pennsylvania.

Alexander earned her doctorate during the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of Black families were leaving the South for cities like Philadelphia in search of work and a better life. Her dissertation, “The Standard of Living Among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia,” was published that same year in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

The study was a careful economic analysis of the household budgets of 100 Black migrant families in the city. Alexander documented what these families earned and what they spent on food, housing, and clothing, and she measured the distance between their incomes and the real cost of living decently in Philadelphia. Coming roughly two decades after W.E.B. Du Bois published “The Philadelphia Negro,” her work argued that segregation, and not any failing of the migrants themselves, was keeping Black families from getting ahead.

You can read The Standard of Living Among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia here.

Her scholarship was matched by her devotion to the sisterhood. In March 1918, while still an undergraduate at Penn, Alexander became one of five charter members of the Gamma Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., the sorority’s third chapter and the first Black Greek-letter organization founded on Penn’s campus. She served as president of Gamma Chapter, and from 1919 to 1923 she led the entire organization as its first National President. During her tenure she helped take Delta Sigma Theta from a loose federation of chapters to a true national body, and she launched May Week, the sorority’s first national program.

Alexander’s commitment to the race extended well beyond her sorority. Alongside her husband, she was active in civil rights work in Philadelphia and across the nation. In 1946 President Harry Truman appointed her to the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, and in 1952 she joined the city’s Commission on Human Relations, serving through 1968. She was a founding member of the national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in 1963, and she served on the board of the National Urban League for 25 years. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter named her to chair the decennial White House Conference on Aging.

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander passed away on November 1, 1989, but the doors she knocked down remain open. Her 1921 study stands as a foundational piece of Black economic scholarship, and more than a century later, the sorors of Delta Sigma Theta still carry forward the legacy of a woman who put her brilliance in the service of her people.