University Homes Project Manager

Alonzo Graseano Moron

Alonzo Grascano Moron (1909-1971) served as the first Project Manager for University Homes. His personal experience of managing public housing in Atlanta at University Homes contributed to his views concerning the impact of segregation. Moron pursued an unequivocal stance for racial equality and civil rights. Later, he used his position as President of Hampton College to articulate key issues in racial justice in the state of Virginia, the South, and the United States. Moron’s beliefs on race, education, desegregation, and integrated democracy brought about his significant impact in the aftermath of one of the most important public policy decisions in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Moron was persistently sought out for his role as speaker and for his combative resistance against opponents to desegregation.

Born in 1909 on the island of St. Thomas while under Danish sovereignty, Moron began his life as a colonial subject in a society structured by imperialism, class, color, and extreme poverty. He was born to a single mother, Caroline Louisa Brown, a young black seamstress, and the illegitimate son to Joseph Metzante Moron, described by varying accounts as a white Jewish boy and a mulatto of Scottish heritage. In 1917 the U.S. bought the Virgin Islands for geostrategic reasons. In some ways the Virgin Islands shared political structures with the U.S. in terms of its colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and imperialism. Consequently Moron experienced being the subject of two empires with similar, though not identical racial dynamics.

In 1935, at the urging of Dr. John Hope, Moron returned to the Mainland and enrolled in a training institute for housing managers. In short time, Moron accepted the position of manager of the large, segregated Public Works Administration housing project at University Homes.


University-John Hope Homes, office staff, maintenance staff, and tenant association, "University Office Staff 1937." "Seated: Walter M. Bell, Cashier; Al Moron, First Project Manager; Cordelia Hill, Secretary. Standing: Maggie Carter, Management Aide; Julius Alexander, Maintenance Superintendent; Georgia Walton, Receptionist; J. H. Henderson, Bookkeeper; Ann Clark Pennemon, Clerk/Cashier; H. M. Jackson, Interview Clerk." Photograph UNIV 2013.00447, Atlanta Housing Archives.


Managing University Homes meant Moron worked with many community institutions, among them the tenant’s association and a newspaper. Among the circles he was a part of in Atlanta included individuals and groups involved in fighting segregation. Moron’s personal and political history made him acutely aware to the limitations that he and other blacks endured.

In his correspondence dated Oct. 12, 1939 to Miss Jean Coman, consultant on Survey of Housing and Welfare, he wrote, “While white families in Atlanta are getting less relief than the average for the country, Negro families get even less.” He writes that all administrative positions in any federal relief agency are white and so there is no avenue for appeal and that the situation is governed by a process in which, “Negros have far less than the usual amount of continuous employment on Works Progress Administration projects and are taken on and laid off in accordance with the needs of the particular project on which they were allowed to work rather than on the need of the individual families for existence.”

Moron remained deeply committed to the goal of integration and the betterment of those in the disparity of the racial and poverty divide. “Our objective should be: No one will be lonely in the midst of neighbors, no one starving in the midst of plenty, no one stunted in spiritual growth in a democracy”

After serving as housing manager of University Homes, Dr. Alonzo G. Moron went on to become the 8th President of Hampton Institute. Moron was the first African-American to hold the position at the school, serving between the years 1948-1959.

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