Alex Sanders

Alexander Mullings Sanders Jr. was born on 29 September 1938 in Columbia, South Carolina, to Alex and Ret (Thomas) Sanders, whose family came from Ridgeway. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father arranged hunting and fishing trips, and he grew up in modest circumstances, attending AC Moore Elementary School, Hand Middle School and Dreher High School.

At about 16 he joined a small travelling circus. He later recalled starting out cleaning up after the elephants before a showman known as The Impossible Possible taught him the craft of the midway; he learned to juggle, eat fire, swallow swords and perform magic, a love of showmanship that stayed with him for life.

After serving in the United States Army he studied at the University of South Carolina, graduating in 1960, and earned his law degree there in 1962, serving as student body president. He later took a master's degree in the judicial process at the University of Virginia.

After law school Sanders practised as a trial lawyer. He was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in the late 1960s and joined a group of reform-minded young legislators known as the Young Turks, alongside Joseph P. Riley Jr. and Richard Riley. When I. S. Leevy Johnson became one of the first two Black members of the House in the 20th century, Sanders invited him to share his two-person desk, a gesture Johnson later described as a deliberate signal that he belonged.

In the early 1970s he led the campaign to stop timber companies cutting the old-growth forest of the Congaree swamp east of Columbia. After a visit with an Audubon Society member he said he had heard the call of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird long thought extinct, and warned that the death of the bird would be akin to the death of an angel. Logging halted, and the tract went on to become Congaree National Monument and later Congaree National Park. Asked years afterwards what became of the bird, he replied: "He was there when I needed him." He also campaigned against a planned BASF chemical plant near Hilton Head Island in 1970.

Sanders served in the South Carolina Senate from 1977 to 1983, chairing the state's first Council of Advisors on consumer affairs and sponsoring conservation and water-use legislation. In December 1982 he announced he would not seek re-election, helping to clear the way for a single-member district plan in Richland County likely to elect a Black senator.

In 1983 he was chosen as the first chief judge of the newly created South Carolina Court of Appeals, a post he held until 1992. He then became the 19th president of the College of Charleston, serving until 2001. Under him total enrolment rose by 16 percent and international enrolment by 99 percent; he backed new study abroad programmes, the acquisition of the site of the Addlestone Library, the Patriots Point athletics complex, the Tate Center and the Jewish Studies Center, and the college's first capital campaign. He was named president emeritus in 2001.

In 2002 he was the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate seat left open by the retirement of Strom Thurmond, losing to Republican congressman Lindsey Graham in a race that drew national attention. He never ran for office again. He co-founded the Charleston School of Law in 2002 and served as its president until 2013, was a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics in 2003, taught at Harvard and the University of South Carolina, returned to private law practice and taught an undergraduate course on law at the College of Charleston until fall 2020.

Sanders married Zoe Dutrow in 1964; the two had first met on a playground in Columbia when they were about four years old. As first lady of the College of Charleston she was known as a gracious host, and sales of her cookbook, Entertaining at the College of Charleston, continue to fund scholarships. She died earlier in 2026. They had a daughter, Zoe Carolina Sanders, and he had two grandchildren.

He was a close friend of the novelist Pat Conroy, who credited him with stories that found their way into his books and chose him to deliver the eulogy at his funeral in 2016. Sanders was at once a member of the NAACP and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and an outspoken opponent of flying the Confederate flag on State House grounds; he also belonged to both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association. He opposed the death penalty and was a lifelong environmentalist. In his last years he lived at the Still Hopes retirement community in West Columbia.

Alex Sanders died peacefully in his sleep on Tuesday 20 October 2026 at the Still Hopes retirement community in West Columbia, South Carolina, at the age of 88. His death was announced by his daughter, Zoe Carolina Sanders, who told The Post and Courier she had had lunch with him hours earlier: "He just went to take a nap and never woke up. It was so sudden." No other cause of death was given.

The College of Charleston paid tribute the following day. Its president, Andrew T. Hsu, said: "Judge Sanders transformed what was once a small school into a university with national reach and universal appeal." Former colleague Patti Goff said his ability to make everyone feel appreciated and included was unmatched, and I. S. Leevy Johnson called him "way ahead of his time". Funeral services were to be announced later.

Sanders is remembered as one of the most colourful and influential figures in modern South Carolina public life. His woodpecker story helped preserve what is now Congaree National Park, the state's only national park. As the first chief judge of the Court of Appeals he shaped a new tier of the state's courts, and at the College of Charleston he oversaw a period of growth and internationalisation that the university credits with setting it on its present course. Generations of lawyers, politicians and students remembered him above all for his wit, his wrinkled suits and the hundreds of stories, true and tall, that he told.