Alva Beatrice Maxey-Boyd papers

Biographical note

Alva Beatrice Maxey was born March 21, 1913 in Madison, Georgia to Charles Lincoln Maxey and Tena Beatrice Johnson-Maxey, who were both public school teachers and principals in the Atlanta area. Alva was the youngest of four children; her siblings were Chandos Maxey, Charles Maxey Jr., and Edwina Marie Maxey Austell. She attended Talladega College in Alabama from 1928-1932 where she was inducted into Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s Chi Chapter and graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. She then moved to Oberlin, Ohio to pursue her Master of Arts in Sociology at Oberlin College, conferred in 1933. Maxey then attended Western Reserve University (name changed to Case Western Reserve in 1947) in Cleveland, Ohio from 1933-1935. She worked to finish her Master’s thesis between 1935-1938 and received a Master’s of Science in Social Administration. Alva Maxey moved to Chicago in the 1940s to work as a social worker. After World War II, she began work with the Chicago Urban League, where she was the Community Organization Director from 1950-1955. In that position, she planned, directed and supervised the Community Organization Department’s programming. Its activities were aimed at stimulating and encouraging greater community participation and civic responsibility in African American communities through the formation of neighborhood Block Clubs.

After leaving her position with the Chicago Urban League, Maxey taught at Roosevelt University as an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department from 1955-1970. While she taught at Roosevelt, she regularly took courses at the University of Chicago from 1941-1965. Also during this period, Maxey moved to Canada for a short time while she pursued a doctoral degree at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. Her dissertation was entitled “A Probe into the Dimensionality of Race and Ethnic Stereotyping.” Maxey received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Saskatchewan in 1972. She then taught at Northeastern Illinois University from 1973-1982 as an Associate Professor of Sociology.

Maxey met Charles Wilson Turner Boyd in Chicago in the 1940s. Boyd worked at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station during World War II where he processed discharged sailors. Maxey and Boyd married June 27, 1945 in Waukegan, Illinois. After the war, Boyd attended Law School at DePaul University.

In 1948, Maxey and Boyd purchased a historic Queen Anne mansion, built for George E. Wood in 1885 and located at 2801 South Prairie Avenue, in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. The previous owner, Ann Louise Wood Meadowcroft had not lived in the property for eighteen years and the house was in a state of decay. It took Maxey and Boyd four years to restore the house to its former grandeur.

In 1952 the Land Clearance Commission notified Maxey and Boyd that they wanted to obtain the house in order to expand the nearby Prairie Shores Apartments, a public housing complex, as part of a large-scale urban renewal project that had begun in 1946. Maxey and Boyd fought to save the house from demolition. Boyd was a practicing civil lawyer for the Chicago Sanitary Commission and knew the legal procedures necessary to deter the Land Clearance Commission. With the help of his legal knowledge, the couple was able to preserve their house; however, the surrounding lots on South Prairie Avenue were demolished.

After retiring from teaching in 1982, Maxey’s hobby became the continued restoration and preservation of her Prairie Avenue home, which she undertook with renewed vigor after Charles Boyd’s death in 1990. In October 2003 she gave a speech about the preservation of her Prairie Avenue mansion before Chicago’s Landmarks Commission. The Wood-Maxey-Boyd House was designated a city landmark later that year. Maxey continued to devote her time to preserving the house until her death on February 3, 2009.