Mary Alexander struck a pose in front of a display case at the World of Coca-Cola, and the cameras started to flash.
“Is that her?” an onlooker asked.
“Yes, that’s her,” her proud husband answered.
Though half a century separated them, the silver-haired lady beaming in the museum was the same person as the dark-haired beauty beaming in the advertisement behind the glass. Now 73, Alexander was a Clark College junior in 1955 when she became the first African-American woman to model for Coca-Cola.
Last week, she came home like a queen. Even the Coca-Cola polar bear paid homage. During a reception for Alexander last week, the mascot dropped to one knee, took her hand in paw and gave it a courtly kiss.
In the background, eight video monitors played highlights of Coke commercials featuring African-Americans through the years: Ray Charles, James Brown, Whitney Houston, Michael Jordan and more.
Alexander was there before any of them. Not that she wanted to be.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she said. “I was scared.”
It was a few hours before the reception, and Alexander was sitting in a conference room in the downtown Atlanta museum with a scrapbook of her ads and clippings from her days as Clark homecoming queen. With her tailored olive suit, gold hoop earrings and meticulous coif, she still cut a regal figure.
Era of legal segregation
Her story begins in early 1955 when a dormitory housemother told her Coca-Cola was looking for some college students.
It was the era of legal segregation, the same year the Montgomery Bus Boycott began and kicked the civil rights movement into high gear. Coca-Cola had started using black endorsers such as Lionel Hampton and Satchel Paige a few years before, but it had never employed non-celebrities in ads aimed at black consumers.
“You just didn’t see many Negro faces in ads back then,” Alexander recalled.
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Mary Cowser, as she was known then, was a shy girl fresh off the farm in Ballplay, Ala., near Gadsden.
She told her housemother that she was too busy, but the woman insisted that she go to the interview.
“I went back to my room that night and cried,” Alexander said.
When Coke chose her, she had another worry: her father. He was a very traditional man who thought modeling sounded vaguely risque. She was particularly concerned because one of the ads called for her to don a bathing suit.
Alexander’s mother broke the news to him. His attitude changed considerably when his daughter brought home her first check for $600.
“That was enough to pay a year’s tuition,” she said.
Alexander worked with two male students from Clark and Morehouse. Although they were all of similar age, they were posed in various domestic scenes as if they were a family, with the youngest-looking one playing the child.
She appeared in about 14 ads in all, earning $1,500 total. They ran in magazines such as Ebony and in black-oriented newspapers such as the Atlanta Daily World. One of the images was used on signs in New York subways and on billboards across the nation.
Alexander’s brother spotted one of them as he was driving through Mississippi with friends. “That’s my sister!” he exclaimed.
They didn’t believe him.
After her work for Coke, Alexander never modeled again. She graduated from Clark in 1956 and moved to Detroit, where she pursued a career in education, retiring as a high school principal.
Ad hangs in sunroom
She had a brief marriage to pro football star Dick “Night Train” Lane and remarried 25 years ago to Henry Alexander, a human resources man. They eventually moved to Ocala, Fla., where a framed copy of one of her ads hangs in their Florida room.
That keepsake explains how she came to Coke’s attention again this spring.
Sylvia Wright, a friend of Alexander’s, visited her in Florida, saw the ad and heard the story. When the new World of Coca-Cola was about to open in May, she contacted Coke to tell them about the woman she calls “Aunt Mary.”
Archivist Phil Mooney was intrigued but cautious. “We get calls all the time from people who say their mother or some other relative modeled for Coke,” he explained. “Unfortunately, most people don’t have any documentation, so it’s a matter of oral history or family legend.”
Letter clinches claim
Mooney assigned Jamal Booker of his staff to research the claim. He hit the library to consult old publications and visited Clark Atlanta University to look at yearbooks. When he called Alexander, she produced the clinching evidence: a 1950s letter from a regional Coke exec thanking her for her work.
“There was no doubt it was her,” Booker concluded.
In a happy accident, it turned out the museum was already displaying one of Alexander’s ads. In its “Milestones of Refreshment” exhibit, she’s pictured sitting on a sofa with two classmates, all of them clutching those iconic green bottles.
And that’s where she found herself posing again last week: in front of that ad. Coke had invited her to Atlanta for a reception and to appear on comedian Steve Harvey’s radio show in a live broadcast from the World of Coca-Cola.
Perhaps 20 family members joined company employees at the gathering in the museum. Alexander spoke first, thanking Coke for giving her the confidence to pursue her dreams. Then it was Harvey’s turn.
Looking Alexander over, the entertainer blurted out what a lot of people were thinking: that she still looked like she could model.
“Miss Mary’s got it goin’ on,” he said. “If that’s what Coke can do for you, I’m a Coke man.”
The silver-haired lady from the ads just smiled.
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