Activist an essential force in school integration drive

June Shagaloff Alexander, whose work for the NAACP and its legal arm in the 1950s and ’60s put her at the forefront of the nationwide fight for school integration and made her a close confidante of civil rights figures including Thurgood Marshall and James Baldwin, died March 29 at her home in Tel Aviv, Israel. She was 93.

Her son, David Alexander, confirmed the death.

Alexander (Shagaloff at the time) joined the civil rights movement as a college student, beginning as an intern with the NAACP’s legal department.

Marshall, who ran the department and later became a Supreme Court justice, put her to work on the legal challenges against segregated education that he and his team would take to the Supreme Court.

Alexander continued her work after the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional, in its 1954 decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education. She worked with white and Black families to prepare them for integration, and with local civil rights groups to test the speed and commitment of school districts to desegregation.

Her organizing played an important part in Marshall’s vision for desegregation, said Sherrilyn Ifill, president emerita of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. “She was essential to the work,” Ifill said.

Later, as the NAACP’s first education director, she helped lead the fight in Northern cities against de facto segregation: the existence of separate Black- and white-majority schools not because of any specific law, but because of geographic and economic disparities that many white politicians claimed were naturally occurring but that often resulted from discriminatory housing and employment policies.

Living in New York’s Greenwich Village she became close friends with Black intellectuals like Baldwin, the novelist and essayist, and his brother David.

Thanks to the Baldwin brothers, Alexander was one of a small number of civil rights figures invited to a meeting in May 1963 with Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, in a New York City apartment.

For almost three hours, Alexander watched as Kennedy, who thought the civil rights movement was moving too fast, parried, harangued and argued with singer Harry Belafonte, playwright Lorraine Hansberry and others, until Hansberry got up and left in anger, with most of the rest following behind.

Although the meeting ended in acrimony and Kennedy later ordered the FBI to tap James Baldwin’s phone, many historians see the meeting as a turning point for the attorney general, who by the fall was a leading figure in the push for the Civil Rights Act.

June Shagaloff was born in 1928 in New York City. She married Michael Alexander, who owned an interior design company on Long Island, in 1970. He died in 1992.

Along with her son, she is survived by her stepdaughter, Priscilla Alexander, and two grandchildren.

Jack Madigan / Hearst Newspapers 1966 Civil rights activist June Shagaloff (left, later June Alexander), Shirley Brown and Victor Lord, all with the NAACP, meet with David Bray, assistant superintendent of Albany, N.Y., schools, in 1966. Alexander was at the forefront of the civil rights drive.