Joseph L. Alexander, 72; Pioneer Surgeon

Dr. Joseph L. Alexander, a military and civilian surgeon who achieved many firsts for African Americans, including becoming the first black member of the all-white California Club in Los Angeles, has died. He was 72.

Alexander died May 6 in Los Angeles after a brief illness. No cause of death was given.

The doctor became a member of the city’s oldest private club in February 1988, less than a year after Los Angeles enacted an ordinance banning discrimination by private-membership organizations. Both he and the club leadership said his application had been in process before the ordinance was passed.

From its founding in 1887 until well into the 1970s, the California Club had a reputation for hostility toward blacks and Jews. When he became Los Angeles’ first black mayor in 1973, Tom Bradley adopted a policy of never going to the club. A white member with a black guest in the 1970s found that nobody would serve them in the main dining room.

Jews gradually won admission, but it was the 1980s before blacks were discussed as potential members. The club proffered membership in its 1,275-man group to influential attorney Sam Williams, former chairman of the city Police Commission and a friend of Bradley’s, but Williams declined.

Alexander said he applied for membership in 1986 at the urging of white friends who were California Club members, including attorney James H. Kindel Jr., his neighbor at the downtown Bunker Hill Tower condominium complex. But he said the application stalled for many months, finally picking up speed when talk grew about an impending anti-discrimination ordinance.

“I don’t want to join just to be joining,” Alexander told The Times on Feb. 1, 1988, when he was due to sign the club roster. “And it certainly wasn’t to integrate the club. It was to enjoy life and extend the friendships I’ve already made with club members.”

Even Alexander’s supporters worried that he might face hostility in the club’s imposing South Flower Street facilities from old-line members who favored the all-white male policy.

“I don’t mind if someone doesn’t want to associate with me,” he told The Times. “I’ve always picked and chosen my friends myself. Being black in America, I’ve been exposed to things and I’m confident the transition into the club will not be difficult.”

Tall, elegant and dignified, Alexander delayed his formal signing-in until he could do it quietly without the glare of media coverage.

Born in Oneonta, Ala., and reared in Kentucky by a single mother, Joseph Lee Alexander was long accustomed to breaking barriers for blacks. Dedicated to education from an early age, he won a full scholarship to Fisk University, graduated magna cum laude and went on to become in 1951 the first black student admitted to the University of Louisville Medical School.

Joining the Army, he practiced first at Walter Reed Medical Center outside Washington, D.C.

After winning a fellowship to study organ transplants at Harvard, he returned to Walter Reed to head its organ transplantation service.

He personally performed the Army’s first kidney transplant.

Alexander moved to Los Angeles when he retired from the Army to join Martin Luther King/Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School.

He was the founding director of King/Drew’s Trauma Center and taught surgery at UCLA School of Medicine.

There are no immediate survivors. Services are being planned by the Angeles Funeral Home in Los Angeles.