Donald Alexander (IRS)

Donald Alexander served as Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service from 1973 to 1977, appointed by President Nixon and retained under President Ford. His mandate was straightforward: enforce the law. In the case of private schools, that meant implementing the 1971 Green v. Connally ruling, in which a federal district court held that racially discriminatory private schools were not entitled to tax-exempt status under the Internal Revenue Code. A school that discriminated by race was, by definition, not operating for the public benefit — and therefore not eligible for a federal subsidy through tax exemption. Alexander's enforcement of this principle was not an ideological crusade. It was the routine application of a court order. The IRS under his leadership sent notices to segregated private academies — many of them newly founded in the South specifically to avoid court-ordered school integration — informing them that their tax-exempt status was under review. The proposed rule-making that followed in 1978 (after Alexander had left office) represented the culmination of the enforcement project he had helped institutionalize. The Religious Right's response to this enforcement was swift and furious — and, as historians have documented, it became the actual founding moment of the movement. Paul Weyrich, the chief architect of the Religious Right as a political machine, later acknowledged that the IRS's action against Bob Jones University and similar institutions was 'the spark that set the movement on fire,' not Roe v. Wade. Jerry Falwell Sr. had founded Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967 as a segregation academy; the IRS's scrutiny of such institutions was a direct threat to his institutional project. The Religious Right reframed Alexander's enforcement as religious persecution: the federal government was attacking Christian education, threatening parental rights, and imposing secular values on faithful communities. This framing was effective precisely because it obscured the underlying issue — racial discrimination — and substituted a narrative of religious liberty under siege. Donald Alexander was doing his job. The political movement that arose in reaction to his doing that job became one of the most powerful forces in American democracy.

Documented themes

• Opposition / Resistance
• Race & Civil Rights

Connections from Donald Alexander (IRS)

• influenced → Green v. Connally (IRS Ruling) (1973) — Donald Alexander, as IRS Commissioner from 1973–1977, was the senior federal official responsible for enforcing the Green v. Connally (1971) ruling, which held that racially discriminatory private schools were ineligible for tax-exempt status. Alexander's enforcement of Green v. Connally — sending notices to segregated private academies and reviewing their tax-exempt status — was the administrative action that Paul Weyrich later identified as the true founding provocation of the Religious Right, triggering the evangelical political mobilization of the late 1970s.

Sources

• Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right — Randall Balmer (2021)
• Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States — Sara Diamond (1995)