Alston was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1895. He studied painting, architecture and rendering at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Arts, Shaw University, and the Detroit School of Lettering. He studied painting with two Pyle students: Thornton Oakley and George Harding and won prizes as an art student in Philadelphia.
Alston taught architectural rendering at Tuskegee in the early 1920s and by 1929 he was working as the Art Director at Sumner High School in St. Louis. He was the first art director and cartoonist on the staff of the St. Louis American newspaper. Most of his exhibition history is in St. Louis, though in the 1920s and early '30s he also showed in national exhibitions for African American artists. His work was shown at Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington, DC in 1948, and later included in the famous Barnett-Aden collection. Despite this impressive showing, little is known of the artist today. Two of his paintings, Song Feast and The Good Books Says (shown in the 1929 Harmon exhibition), are in the collection of the James E. Lewis Museum of Art at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland.
