Alexander, the Great

Share This!

“I never met anyone who did not have something to teach me,” Alex says, standing outside the apartment complex that bears his name.

One day some 40 years ago, when Alex Denson was a young civil trial lawyer in Raleigh, he was walking down the street with Charles Blanchard, a senior partner at his firm. As they discussed a case, they came upon a man passed out on the sidewalk. “I did not see him as a man,” Alex says of that first moment. “But Charles stopped and knelt down and gently lifted the man’s head and asked him if he was alright. That was my first real awareness of homelessness.”

That encounter set a course that led to the Denson Apartments for Veterans (at the intersection of Sedgefield Street and Guess Road) run by CASA, now full of men and women who served the country but needed help finding a decent place to live. CASA – Community Alternatives for Supportive Abodes – is a nonprofit, hands-on landlord and developer of affordable housing for extremely low-income people with disabilities.

A Growing Need

Raised in the 1950s in the small hamlet of Whitakers, 13 miles north of Rocky Mount, Alex never saw any homeless people. That moment on the street in Raleigh did not immediately spur Alex into action – “I was busy being a lawyer and growing a practice” – but it did stay with him.

After 25 years of practicing law, Alex was appointed to be a U.S. magistrate judge from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. “Soon after taking on that role in 1981, two cases came before me in October – 10 days apart,” Alex recalls. “The first was a drunk man who threw a bottle of wine through the federal courthouse window and stood there waiting to get arrested, and the second was a man who, using a payphone across the street from the courthouse, called in a threat that he was going to kill the President and waited on the line until the police arrived to arrest him.”

Alex did some research and learned that, at the time, there was just one homeless shelter in Raleigh that would take anyone. “It only housed 25 people,” he says. “It was always full, and it was getting cold. Committing a low-level federal crime ensured these men a warm place to sleep and meals – albeit in prison.”

Going Forward on Faith

Alex worked in Raleigh to get a much larger homeless shelter opened and eventually joined the board of CASA. Debra King, the chief executive officer of CASA, calls Alex “the most wonderful example of what a great public servant can be.”

“Whatever Alex is doing, he really shows up and makes unassuming contributions,” she says.

Around the time that Alex started helping CASA, he married his wife, Mary. Since she was tied to a house, neighborhood and church in Durham, Alex moved. He was no stranger to the city, having gone to law school at Duke after leaving the Navy.

To most of the world, Alex was known as Judge Denson, with all the respect that the title commands, but he continued to work more and more with homeless people. “When I would leave the courthouse with lawyers and clerks and walk to lunch, sometimes [homeless] men would call out, ‘Hey, Alex’ to me as we walked by,” he says.“I just said they were my friends.”

Alex takes an interest in each person he comes across. “I never met anyone who did not have something to teach me,” he says. “You can learn something from everyone you meet.”

Alex is now a retiree living in Durham. The Denson Apartments are a testament to his years of work on behalf of those who met bad circumstances and just needed a hand. Now, CASA is building a second phase of the apartments. “The first one was full in two days,” Debra says, “so we knew we had to get started on the second right away. We still have a little way to go to finish the funding, but we are going forward on faith. The second unit will, of course, be named after Alex. I respect him so much I even named my second son after him.”

Ed. Note: This article first appeared in our February/March 2015 issue.

Share This!

Posted in

Dana Lange

Dana, a beloved member of the Durham Magazine team since our launch and the past board chair of the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, highlights her fellow Durhamites making a difference by giving back.
Scroll to Top