2021 Legal Legends of Color: Judge Elreta Melton Alexander
News & Record Photo
Judge Elreta Melton Alexander was honored posthumously this year as a recipient of the Legal Legends of Color Award. The groundbreaking attorney and judge from Greensboro died in 1998 after a lifetime of accomplishments and firsts that are indeed the stuff of legend.
Former Chief Justice Henry Frye, honored in 2016 when the NCBA Minorities in the Profession Committee first presented this award, achieved numerous firsts of his own, from being the first Black student to complete all three years of law school and graduate from the UNC School of Law in 1959 to becoming the state’s first Black legislator elected in the 20th century in 1968 to becoming the first African American to serve as an associate justice (1983) and chief justice (1999) on the state’s highest court.
Alexander was the first Black woman to graduate from Columbia Law School (1945), the first Black woman licensed in North Carolina to practice law in this state (1947), and the first Black woman to be elected judge (1968) in North Carolina.
In addition to receiving their undergraduate degrees from North Carolina A&T State University, Alexander and Frye crossed paths many times during their distinguished careers.
“She was a little ahead of me,” said Frye, who served in the U.S. Air Force and attained the rank of captain before attending law school. “But I knew her, and I got chewed out by her once or twice when she was a District Court judge!
“She gave me the worst chewing out of anybody that I ever had, and I respected it, and it was because of some things I had said that I should not have said, at least in her opinion.”
Frye also recalls assisting Alexander with a medical malpractice case, at her request.
“I learned more law in those six months or so that we worked on that case and tried than I learned in a whole year of law school,” Frye said. “When I put it that way, it’s because there were things I had no way of knowing; I had ‘book learning.’ She did most of the trying of the case, and would have me look stuff up.
“She was the best cross-examiner that I ever knew. She really prepared for her cases, and she would start out asking questions of the witness, especially when she knew that eventually that the witness was going to be a difficult one. She could be so sweet. She knew how to warm him up, or her! I worked with her on a few cases where she had me looking up the law, and I was awed. I learned a great deal from her.”
As a Black woman and a Black attorney, Alexander’s election to the bench was very important at that moment, Frye said, and in terms of the doors it opened for African American jurists who followed in her footsteps.
“She required respect herself, and when she was presiding, she expected to be treated like a judge. For a short period of time, and I am going to put it blunt, some lawyers did not respect her the way that she thought they should have, and she knew how to make them respect her. And she could be so sweet about it.”
Alexander, he added, was also a very hard-working judge.
“She really, at some times, had substantial portions of the cases for several days,” Frye said. “How she handled so many cases I don’t know.”
In “Celebrating the Life of Judge Elreta Melton Alexander ’45,” the Columbia Law School website devotes special coverage to one of its most distinguished graduates. In so doing, the website notes that she ran for office using the slogan, “The Symbol of Justice Is a Woman. Elect a Living Symbol of Justice.”
The slogan is most appropriate, for even now, as Judge Elreta Melton Alexander is honored posthumously as a Legal Legend of Color, her legacy lives on as a symbol of justice.
Russell Rawlings is director of external affairs and communications for the North Carolina Bar Association.