June Shagaloff Alexander (June 14, 1928 – March 29, 2022) was an American civil rights activist. Early life June Shagaloff Alexander was born in 1928 in New York City. Her parents, Samuel Shagaloff and Gertrude Bellinson, emigrated to the United States from Russia in 1905. Their household was secular Jewish, and valued socialist ideals. Her father was a pharmacist who owned and managed a drugstore, first in Merrick and then in Baldwin, Long Island. As a child, she spent time at her father's store and, in the summer, at nearby Jones Beach. Some people believed she was African-American and, at an early age, she experienced racial discrimination. These experiences left a lasting impression, and contributed to her civil rights activism as an adult. In 1946, she enrolled at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati, and graduated from New York University in 1950 with a degree in Sociology with honors. Civil Rights Work In 1950, June Shagaloff joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall, who hired her at the end of an undergraduate internship. Marshall, who would later become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, believed that the success of litigation depended on its impact on families and their willingness to demand desegregation and send their children to desegregated schools. Consequently, he hired Shagaloff, one of two staff members of the department who was not a lawyer, to conduct social research and organize communities around issues of school desegregation. As one of her first assignments, in 1952 Marshall sent her to Cairo, Illinois to help the NAACP branch end school segregation. While she was in Cairo, she was arrested for conspiring to "endanger the health and life of certain children." Marshall immediately flew to Cairo and, after many hours at the jailhouse, negotiated her release. On another assignment, she helped develop the social research which was critical in the Legal Defense Fund's victory in the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in America. She aided psychologist Kenneth Clark in examining experiences of children in segregated schools and in the process of desegregating various institutions. They found that children in segregated schools that offered similar material resources were nevertheless impacted negatively by the fact of segregation, including the development of lower esteem and motivation levels. This research led the Supreme Court to overcome