Edwin Alderman: Crusader for Southern Education

Edwin Anderson Alderman was born in Wilmington in eighteen sixty-one and became one of the most influential educators in the history of the American South. He served as president of three universities in succession: the University of North Carolina from eighteen ninety-six to nineteen hundred, Tulane University from nineteen hundred to nineteen oh four, and finally the University of Virginia from nineteen oh four until his death in nineteen thirty-one. Throughout his career Alderman campaigned relentlessly for universal public education at a time when the South lagged badly behind the rest of the nation in schooling.

He believed that education was the foundation of democratic life, and he spent three decades building institutions to prove it. The house where he was born stood on this site in Wilmington.