In an article written in The Alternative Orange written by Robert Plotkin, the brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon held what was deemed as a jungle theme party on the campus of Texas A&M University. In order to get the full effect of the theme, the big brothers had the pledges blacken their faces, dress in grass skirts, carry spears, and run throughout the house hunted by men dressed in military fatigues. This form of racial insensitivity among Caucasian fraternities has been an infamous tradition since the founding of the first fraternity in the U.S. Is this insensitivity the reason for the creation of black Greek letter organizations? Black Greek letter organizations became the movement for African-American males to form networking relationships and fraternal bonds for their race, which they could not get from anywhere else. According to a homepage for black Greek letter organizations, it is explained that in the beginning, black Greek letter organizations were created to provide brotherhood /sisterhood for African-Americans attending college. This is mainly due to the fact that they, African-Americans, were not welcomed in the other established Greek letter societies so they created their own. The brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha are given credit for being the first and oldest black Greek letter organization to successfully expand into new chapters. Sigma Pi Phi was founded under Mr. Henry M. Minton in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to bond Negroes within the professional ranks of society. The brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha are given the privilege of being the first organization implemented in the Pan-Hellenic Council which was formed as a governing body to aid organizations in a bond of common causes. Next to follow were the brothers of Kappa Alpha Psi and Omega Psi Phi both in 1911. In 1914 the fraternity which was founded on the principles of brotherhood, scholarship, and service was produced. Phi Beta Sigma emerged. It was much later in 1963 that the brothers of Iota Phi Theta completed the council.
Robert Plotkin provides his theories in a university news article that discusses discrimination among Greek letter organizations. Plotkin explains how the make up of the student body of universities changed, and how Greek letter organizations began adopting official policies discriminating against African-Americans, Jews, Asian-Americans, and other minorities. In fact, according to Plotkin, the national policy of Lambda Chi Alpha was allowed to pledge only members of the Caucasian race who are of non-Semitic blood. The principles of Christianity were valued with the utmost intensity, and Lambda Chi Alpha rejected those with one-eighth of proscribed blood. These rules were more restrictive than Hitler’s definition of the Semite in his infamous Nuremberg Laws, where his edicts applied only to those who had one-fourth or more of ancestry identifiable as Jewish. It was in the 1950s when these discriminatory policy believers began suspending their chapters for pledging non-Aryans.
According to Oxford American dictionary the word Aryan means importantly (in Nazi ideology) a Caucasian not of Jewish descent. It was these types of discriminatory standards which caused African-Americans to forge their own identity as Greek letter organizations. Plotkin explains how the president of the National Interfraternity Conference, David A. Embury said in 1947 that people should stop shivering at the word discrimination. I love the discriminating tongue, the discriminating eye, the discriminating ear, and above all the discriminating mind and soul. The person for whom I can find no love and no respect is the indiscriminate person. To be indiscriminate is to be common, to be vulgar.
Over time with the common knowledge of discriminating values found in most Greek letter organizations along with the correlation of the increase in minority enrollment in universities, minorities thus began to establish their own fraternities. In The Alternative Orange, Plotkin writes how Phi Kappa Sigma was formed at Brown University in 1889 as a fraternity for Catholic students. In the College Student Journal, Robert Mathiasen states that Greek letter organizations constitute a visible and powerful part of student culture: At most fraternity initiation ceremonies, new members are challenged to be of good character and to be loyal to the other members of the society. So why is it that this same challenge of good character and loyalty cannot be extended to all mankind in the form of a fraternal bond?
Kevin Michael Foster explains in his Race, Ethnicity and Education journal that with the constant progress of time, black students maintained their own system of fraternities and sororities, by having favorite gatherings and using spaces on campus, coordinating extracurricular activities designed to appeal to one another, and in other ways operate as a distinct sub-community of the student body at large. With these new opportunities at fraternal brotherhood and relationships, African-Americans were given the chance to bring a form of dignity and positivity to their organizations and accomplishments in the face of adversity that would have before been denied. To Foster, black Greek letter organizations are formed upon principles of providing leadership and support to black people generally. It is these principles that allow black Greek letter organizations to gain a form of prestige that many people may consider as status honor.
Sources used in the consumption of this article are as follows: gladestone.uregon.edu10, College Student Journal (Robert Mathiasen), Race, Ethnicity, and Education Journal (Kevin Michael Foster), and an article in The Alternative Orange (Robert Plotkin, 2004).