Becoming “Woman of the Year”: Sadie T. M. Alexander’s Construction of a Public Persona as a Black Professional Woman, 1920–1950

This article examines the ways in which Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander—a lawyer and economist—used the ideology and visual aesthetics of the New Negro era to communicate and covertly advertise her professional expertise, to challenge demeaning stereotypes about black women, to trumpet her achievements as ground-breaking firsts, and to obscure family secrets. Alexander shrewdly developed a public persona that used the gendered ideal of women’s collective middle-class leadership of the New Negro era, but she often emphasized her individual intellectual capabilities at the expense of equally talented and committed race women. Ironically, Alexander’s constructed personas (the “Woman of the Year,” the “First Lady of Colored America,” and the “brilliant young lawyer”) concealed so much that was interesting and vital about her social science writings, her legal practice, and her civil rights activism, and advocacy on behalf of black labor.