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.