Fleming Emory Alexander (14 April 1888–13 December 1980), journalist and Baptist minister, was born Fleming Pore in Christiansburg. His mother died when he was an infant, and he and his eight brothers and sisters were separated. When he entered school, he assumed the surname of his foster father, Robert Alexander, and he chose for himself the middle name Emory. Badly treated as a child, he left Christiansburg as a teenager, walking across the mountains into West Virginia to join an older brother who worked in the coalfields. His formal education ended at about the fifth grade.
The details of the next decades of his life are obscure. Somewhere in Kentucky he learned the printing trade, and he is said to have worked for newspapers in Georgia, Kentucky, and Virginia. At one time he owned a movie theater and a taxi company in West Virginia. During World War I he served in France with the 802d Pioneer Infantry.
By the mid-1920s Alexander had moved to Lynchburg, where he taught printing at the Virginia Theological Seminary and College while operating a private printing business. There he came under the influence of Vernon Johns, the pastor at Court Street Baptist Church and a brilliant preacher-scholar who inspired a generation of southern civil rights leaders. Ordained to the ministry in Lynchburg, Alexander served from 1930 to 1935 as pastor of Rustburg Baptist Church in Campbell County. In 1935 he was called to the pastorate of First Memorial Baptist Church in Christiansburg with Johns preaching his installation sermon. Alexander later renamed the church Schaeffer Memorial Baptist Church in honor of the church's founder, Captain Charles S. Schaeffer of the Freedmen's Bureau. Alexander left the Christiansburg church early in 1951 to become pastor of the First Baptist Church of Buchanan, in Botetourt County, a position he held for almost twenty years.
In February 1941 Alexander founded the Roanoke Tribune, a weekly newspaper serving the African American community. Like most black publishers, he struggled financially. He augmented his income with job printing, borrowed funds to keep the paper afloat, often set the type himself, and by necessity relied on white businesses for most of his advertising. During the 1950s Sarah Patton Boyle, of Charlottesville, wrote a regular column for the Tribune entitled "By a White Southerner." At the same time Alexander had an office in Charlottesville with Thomas Jefferson Sellers as his agent. He also had reporters in several other towns in southwestern Virginia, and in 1961 he opened an office in Martinsville.
Alexander was a fervent Democrat and even supported candidates of Harry F. Byrd's organization during the 1940s and early 1950s. In October 1953 he became Negro Democratic campaign manager in the Sixth Congressional District, the first black campaign manager ever, for the statewide ticket of Thomas Bahnson Stanley, Allie Edward Stokes Stephens, and J. Lindsay Almond. In 1954 he advised Stanley to call together leaders of both races in order to find a peaceful means to desegregate the public schools. When Stanley and Almond instead joined Byrd and leaders in the General Assembly in support of Massive Resistance, Alexander criticized them strongly in the Tribune. His stance was still too mild for some of the Roanoke ministers, and tensions between them ensued. In 1956, when Alexander and another black minister both ran for the Roanoke city council after each understood that the other would not and then publicly traded insults, the Roanoke Baptist Ministers' Association publicly rebuked Alexander for his conservatism. Alexander countered by suing several prominent civic and religious leaders for libel. Although the suit was eventually settled out of court, it soured his relations with his fellow African American clergymen. Alexander ran again for city council without success in 1966 and 1968, when it was widely believed that his campaigns were encouraged by white business leaders who considered him a safe and acceptable candidate.
Alexander married Octavia Huzella Walker, in Lynchburg, on 26 May 1910, but their marriage ended in divorce after the birth of a daughter. On 28 November 1923, in Bluefield, West Virginia, he married Sedonia Rotan, a graduate of Ohio State University and a teacher of English and French. They had two daughters and a son. After her death in 1973, Alexander married Florence Fields Wood, a retired music teacher. In 1971, after an automobile accident forced his retirement, Alexander sold the Tribune to his daughter Claudia Sedonia Alexander Whitworth. Fleming Emory Alexander died while on a visit to another daughter in New York on 13 December 1980. His funeral was held at Schaeffer Memorial Baptist Church in Christiansburg, and he was buried at Roselawn Memorial Gardens in Blacksburg.
Sources Consulted:
Family history information provided by Claudia Sedonia Alexander Whitworth and Mary Ann Elizabeth Gayles; first marriage in Marriage Register, Lynchburg, 1910, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); second marriage in Register of Marriages, Mercer County, 1923, West Virginia Archives and History; LVA has 266 issues of the Roanoke Tribune for the years 1951–1957; the clipping file on Alexander at the Roanoke Times and World News contains numerous useful items, especially for the dates 15 Sept. 1952, 26, 31 July, 18 Sept. 1956, and 25 Apr. 1982; the Tribune's anniversary issue of 11 May 1989 also contains useful information; other information about Alexander and Roanoke politics provided by Melville Carico; obituary in Roanoke Times and World News, 14 Dec. 1980 (portrait).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Ann Field Alexander.
How to cite this page:
Ann Field Alexander, "Fleming Emory Alexander (1888–1980)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998, rev. 2023 (https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Alexander_Fleming_Emory, accessed [today's date]).
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