William Alexander

At Siloam

Siloam's list dates Alexander's pastorate from 1896. In May 1897 he spoke at the fiftieth-anniversary jubilee of Brooklyn's Concord Baptist Church. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which called him "of Tarrytown," reported that he argued for the need for Black churches and rejected the claim that separate churches fostered prejudice. Siloam's choir sang at the same service. In June 1897 Wilberforce University in Ohio gave him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity, and the Presbytery of Brooklyn sent him as a delegate to the Synodical Congress at Poughkeepsie, as The Evangelist reported.

His pastorate spanned years when Siloam had no settled home. The old Prince Street church had been taken down by 1891, and the congregation began to rebuild on the site. In November 1897 The Evangelist reported that it was still worshiping in the basement of a church it had not been able to finish, and counted Siloam as one of only four Black Presbyterian congregations in the Synod of New York. The city then took the Prince Street site for the approach to the Manhattan Bridge, and the congregation left in 1907. After three years in the building of the A.M.E. Zion Memorial Church, Siloam bought 404–408 Lafayette Avenue, the former First Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1910. It stayed there until 1944.

In 1905 the Brooklyn Standard Union announced that he would officiate at the funeral of Dr. George Sidney Phillips, a Siloam member for forty years, assisted by his predecessor, Rev. W. R. Lawton. Alexander was still Siloam's pastor when he died in Brooklyn on May 12, 1915. His Find a Grave memorial records his burial in The Evergreens Cemetery.