Welcome to The Alpha Black Podcast, I am your host Ulysses “Butch” Slaughter.  In this episode, I’m going to bring you into the crucial conflict focused on my effort to have a Pennsylvania courthouse renamed for a Black boy named Alexander McClay Williams. In June 1931, Williams was executed by The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania after he was falsely accused of stabbing a white woman at The Glen Mills School in Glen Mills Pennsylvania. Though Williams was exonerated of this crime in June 2022, I believe - like so many others - that his exoneration is not enough to honor his name. On behalf of a national justice alliance, I petitioned Delaware County Council in Media, Pennsylvania, to rename the juvenile courthouse which is currently named for the judge who sentenced Alexander to death. That man’s name is W. Roger Fronefield. 

With blessings from some of Alexander’s family - including his 93-year-old sister - I set out with the alliance to make this historic name change a reality. There is no courthouse in The United States of America named for a Black boy. 

On June 21, 2023, a group of protestors including a man named Sam Lemon went into the chambers of Delaware County Council and attempted to scandalize my name and the efforts of  our national alliance. Joined by some members from Alexander’s family, Lemon led the cry that his great-grandfather’s name should be on the juvenile courthouse. Lemon’s great-grandfather, registered as the first Black attorney in Delaware County, attempted to represent Alexander McClay Williams before the state put the boy to death in 1931.