K. Alexander, Chairman of NAACP, Dies

Kelly Alexander Sr., a veteran civil rights crusader and chairman of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, has died at the age of 69.

Alexander, a Charlotte funeral home director, was declared dead Tuesday night at Charlotte Memorial Hospital.

Longtime Activist

He was elected chairman of the NAACP last January. He had been a member of the NAACP board of directors since 1950 and had been active in civil rights for more than 40 years. As president of the North Carolina conference of the NAACP for 35 years, he built the group into one of the country’s largest with a membership of 27,000.

His home and those of other black leaders were bombed in 1965, a case that remains unsolved.

“That did not change me one bit from continuing my fight for freedom,” he said recently. “In fact it increased my determination to carry on.”

“This is a different South,” Alexander said last year when he was elected chairman of the NAACP. “Now blacks are getting better jobs. There have been important changes--more blacks are in political office. But we are now moving into an area that we should have moved in years ago--economic equality for blacks in this country.”

He said his goal was “for people to learn to love each other and live happily together. I don’t think there’s any better Utopia than that. If we ever can reach that, we’ll be making progress.”

Alexander is survived by two sons, Kelly Jr. and Alfred, his wife, Margaret, 60, and two brothers.