‘You can’t live in fear.’ Charlotte civil rights icon ‘Mother Margaret’ dies at 97
A few hours after falling asleep on a rainy September night in 1965, Margaret Alexander woke up to the sound of an explosion.
She found her windows blown open and shards of glass on the floor. The bombing was one of four that night that targeted civil rights activists in Charlotte. Her son, Kelly M. Alexander Jr., who’s now a state representative, said the blast couldn’t rattle her drive to fight against segregation.
“It freaked her out like it would freak out anybody,” Kelly said. “But did it change her resolve in terms of civil rights advancement? No. Did she start questioning what her husband was doing and what he was leading her kids into? No, not at all.”
Affectionately called “Mother Margaret” or the mother of Charlotte’s civil rights movement, Margaret died Friday. She was 97.
Margaret was married to and served as executive secretary for Kelly Alexander Sr., a state president of the NAACP and a longtime advocate for equality in North Carolina. Her work with her husband, other civil rights leaders and the NAACP was well-known in its own right and advanced the city from the segregation that dominated her youth.
Segregation in Charlotte
Margaret was born in 1924 in Charlotte and grew up in the First Ward neighborhood as an only child. In a 2001 oral history interview in a UNC Charlotte civil rights and desegregation collection, Margaret recalled a different Charlotte from its modern-day version, where the countryside was within walking distance and not every road was paved.
The city also was deeply segregated, she said, from housing and employment to education and social relationships.
She graduated from Second Ward High School in 1942 and attended what’s now North Carolina Central University with a degree in commercial education. She met the elder Kelly, who was then a newspaper reporter, when she was serving as May Queen in 1942.
The two became engaged later and married during her senior year of college.
After they moved to Charlotte, Margaret and Kelly became involved in the local NAACP. She said during the 2001 interview her husband, Kelly, was the driving force of civil rights in Charlotte during the 1950s.
Son Kelly said his mother played a pivotal role as a note-taker and secretary, even if she mostly stayed out of the spotlight.
“When she got married and got started in the movement, men were more of the out-front types and women were doing the support work,” he said. “Even if the women were doing much more of the work, because of the social norms and conventions men got written about and the women didn’t.”
Along with her direct NAACP involvement, Margaret also raised son Kelly, who was born in 1948, and Alfred L. Alexander, who was born in 1952 and now serves as president and CEO of Alexander Funeral Home.
Reaction to the bombing
The Alexander house was like Grand Central Station for civil rights leaders traveling through Charlotte and the neighborhood at large, the younger Kelly said.
Their toys were the neighborhood’s toys. Neighbors stopped by often to ask for help — and NAACP and other civil activists would pass through to meet with the family for dinner.
Margaret said during the 2001 interview the bombing that shook their home brought the community together in some ways. Then-Mayor Stan Brookshire met with NAACP leaders and made a point of eating together in public.
“I think that helped ... for people to see that we weren’t from outer space or something,” she told UNCC. “It opened up doors.”
The perpetrator wasn’t caught, and three other civil rights activists were also targeted. Margaret said she and her husband knew their activism brought some level of risk to their door.
“You can’t live in fear,” she said. “You have to just go on, and you get courage from somewhere, and you just, you just have to live. You just can’t be fearful all your life — you wouldn’t go any place.”
Throughout her life, she met with some of the most prominent civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and NAACP field officer Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in Mississippi in 1963. The family was also close friends with Clarence Mitchell, a longtime lobbyist for the NAACP.
Son Kelly reflected on the arc of her life, from segregation to the civil rights movement to seeing the nation’s first Black president.
“If it happened within the last century, she saw it,” he said.
‘Pressing forward’
During her 2001 interview, Margaret spoke of the complications of progress.
In the years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 — which declared the “separate but equal” doctrine of segregation unconstitutional — Margaret and her husband Kelly attempted to get their children into integrated schools. They were unsuccessful.
Despite multiple attempts, schools shot down their request because, according to the schools at the time, the Alexanders lived too close to the Black school to justify the children attending a primarily white one.
In 1971, though, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education the district could use buses to integrate its schools. A later court case ended that program.
“If you’re in a war, you expect to win some battles and you expect to lose some battles,” son Kelly said of setbacks. “They treated those as skirmishes in a much longer conflict.”
Margaret reflected in the 2001 interview on some of the biggest civil rights accomplishments. They included the hiring of Black police officers and firefighters in Charlotte, opening up additional hospitals to Black patients, opening up pools for Black families and marching against apartheid.
“Still we have a way to go,” she said, “but we are constantly pressing forward till we reach the mark.”
This story was originally published June 7, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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