Contractor-turned-realtor William Alvin Alexander (1878-1960) named this street in January 1923 on his Alexander Home Gardens tract. He had some nerve pasting his name on the tract, given that it was all over the papers the previous year when he was indicted as part of a Ku Klux Klan-led mob that, in an act of vigilante justice, raided a bootlegger’s house in Inglewood. While terrorizing the Spanish Basque family who lived there, one of the mob – an Inglewood cop – was shot dead by law enforcement. 35 others would go on trial, including Alexander and L.L. Bryson, who also has a namesake street here. All were acquitted, but the Los Angeles Times reported that only two of the defendants were not in the KKK – and they weren’t Alexander or Bryson. (Other articles explicitly identified both as Klansmen.) In any event, Alexander was an Illinoisan who married Matilda Nelson (1868-1953), a Swedish immigrant ten years his senior, in 1902. The couple moved to Huntington Park around 1905. There Alexander became a prominent citizen, owning a service station and building (but not designing) the 1917 church that still stands on the corner of Rugby and Gage.
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