James M. Alexander

James Milo Alexander (1815 – 1871) was an African-American businessperson and politician in Phillips County, Arkansas. Alexander was a successful businessperson and the first African-American justice of the peace in Arkansas.[1]

Born into slavery in North Carolina, his enslaver taught him how to read and write. After they moved to Arkansas, which was then a frontier region, he allowed Alexander to establish his own business, a barbershop. Though his business prospered and grew to include the sale of dry goods, he remained in bondage until purchasing his own freedom and that of several family members in 1860. After the war, Alexander was active in Republican politics and served in a number of political offices in Helena, Arkansas including as postmaster, school trustee, grand jury member, and as a representative to the Arkansas House of Representatives.[1]

Family

Five of his seven children attended Oberlin College in Ohio.[1] His fourth child, John Hanks Alexander (1864 – 1894) was the first African-American officer in the United States armed forces to hold a regular command position and the second African-American graduate of the United States Military Academy.[2] Another son, Titus, was a political organizer in California in the 1920s who helped convince African-Americans to support the Democratic Party through the National Negro Democratic Congress.[3]

gollark: It's probably not going to be worse for the phone than just, I don't know, normal web browsing or phone use.
gollark: I mean, there are bigger problems with cloud gaming stuff than phones getting slightly warm, but if you like it I guess...
gollark: Your phone is probably only doing video decoding, which it likely has dedicated hardware for.
gollark: I was intending to make it catch segfaults and mmap in a new region or something to make them not segfault. Unfortunately, this *apparently* invokes vast amounts of horrible undefined behavior and "isn't allowed" and "will summon nasal demons which will destroy everything".
gollark: Unfortunately, my excellent code appears to not work properly.```c#include <stdio.h>#include <signal.h>#include <string.h>#include <stdlib.h>#include <sys/mman.h>#include <unistd.h>static void handler(int sig, siginfo_t *info, void *utterly_worthless_argument) { printf("oh bees segfault %08x\n", info->si_addr); int ps = getpagesize(); long ad = (long)info->si_addr; ad = ad - (ad % ps); mmap((void*)ad, 0x10000, PROT_NONE, MAP_ANONYMOUS|MAP_FIXED, -1, 0);}int main() { struct sigaction sa; sigemptyset(&sa.sa_mask); sa.sa_flags = SA_NODEFER; sa.sa_sigaction = handler; sigaction(SIGSEGV, &sa, NULL); *(int*)NULL = -3; printf("thing done\n"); return 0;}```

See also

References
  1. Foner, Eric (1996). Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction. Louisiana State University Press. p. 4. ISBN 9780807120828.
  2. Ayodale, Braimah. "Alexander, John Hanks (1864-1894)." BlackPast.org.
  3. Taylor, Quintard (1999). In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West 1528-1990. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-24636-0.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.