For most of the country, fraternities and sororities mean one thing – raucous men and spacey blond women coasting through life on Mom and Dad’s fortune. Those of us who wear badges don’t share that sentiment. We know that is not the true picture.
Last Saturday I was listening to one of my favorite internet music shows, done by a jazz guitarist and his wife, a singer and actress. They had just completed a college tour circuit with their high school daughter; the tour included the University of Michigan. That segued into the damage done to a hotel by a few of the Michigan Greek groups, followed by a statement that they couldn’t abide by fraternities and sororities. It was anti-Greek sentiment as conversation between songs. Then on Sunday came the University of Oklahoma SAE incident which went viral at lightening speed.
It gets harder and harder to defend the good that is done by GLOs, the leadership experiences, the opportunity for personal growth, the sisterhood and brotherhood when these awful episodes are sprawled all over the internet, in newspapers and magazines, and on television.
How many living North Americans belong to GLOs? It’s hard to say. My guess is less than 10%, maybe even 5% or so. If anyone has more precise info (that is not on that chart touting “all but two of U.S. Presidents…”) please share it with me.
To the public at large, a/k/a most people, the Greek letters mean absolutely nothing. They can’t tell the difference between a Phi and Psi and a Xi. It is all Greek to them.
Here is a quick tour through the history of GLOs, done while I am not at home with my reference materials and on the absolute worst of internet connections.
When the first fraternity was founded, higher education did not include women. Only men were offered the opportunity to earn a college diploma. When women were admitted to colleges and universities, they sought support systems of their own and created women’s fraternities/sororities. In 1895, the first female Jewish student at the University of Illinois was a founding member of the Pi Beta Phi chapter there, and later a member of its Grand Council. However, Jewish men and women usually did not have the opportunity to join the established GLOs, so they started organizations of their own. Since a large part of the Jewish population in the early 1900s was centered in and around New York city, that is where most of those organizations began. Catholics also weren’t welcome in most GLOs during the early 1900s, so a few Catholic GLOs were started, too. (In researching those early years in the various GLO magazines, I sometimes come across Italian or Jewish sounding names and it makes me wonder if those members were anomalies or if some chapters were able to have some autonomy in membership, research for another day. For instance, Louis Zamperini, of Unbroken and Olympic fame, the son of Italian immigrants, was a Kappa Sigma at USC.)
In the early 1900s, Latino men and Italian men began fraternities of their own, but the real push for Latino organizations did not happen until the 1980s and 1990s. At about the same time, fraternities and sororities for African American students came to life at both historically black institutions and those colleges and universities where African Americans were a distinct minority.
In the third quarter of the 1900s, many Latina/o and multi-cultural GLOs were founded. Most of the founders of these organizations are still alive and can tell the stories of the foundings.
However, while these divisions were set up in the GLO world, they are no longer hard and fast. What were lines based on religion were broken. Catholics slowly became assimilated into chapters. My guestimation is that this started taking place in the 1920s and 1930s (see the Louis Zamperini reference above). Threads of Christianity or Judiasm run through the rituals of most, if not all, the NPC and NIC GLOs, and that added an additional layer to the issue. A non-Christian who joined a Christian-based organization was asked to respect those tenets in the context of the founding of the organization. The same was expected from a Christian who joined a Jewish-based organization. Understanding and honoring can be accomplished without religious conversion. In the 1960s and 1970s, African Americans and those of the Jewish faith were being offered bids to join NPC and NIC groups. Ron Brown, who was the U.S. Secretary of Commerce when he died in a 1996 plane crash, was the first African American member of Sigma Phi Epsilon. He graduated from Middlebury College in 1962.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, was one of the first white women to pledge Delta Sigma Theta. In 1961, as a 19 year-old college student, she was a Civil Rights worker. She was arrested for participating in the Freedom Rides and spent two months on death row. She then enrolled at Tougaloo College where she joined Delta Sigma Theta.
In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, George Washington University was a popular college for the daughters of embassy personnel stationed in Washington, D.C. If you check the roles of the sororities located at GWU, you will likely find members of many cultures.
African Americans who chose to join NPC and NIC organizations, usually forfeit the opportunity to join a NPHC organization. The NPHC groups, in addition to college based chapters have a vibrant program of community based alumni/ae chapters.
There are five umbrella organizations for GLOs. The women’s fraternities/sororities needed some order to their recruitment strategies (it wasn’t called “rush” for nothing!) and came together and formed the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) in 1902. In the late 1940s, the Catholic and Jewish sororities as well as the GLOS which had been only at teacher’s colleges joined NPC. Since the late 197os, there have been 26 members in NPC. Unanimous Agreements are signed by the National Presidents of each organization and all the organizations agree to the terms of the Unanimous Agreements.
The NorthAmerican Interfraternity Conference (NIC) is a trade organization of 75 or so men’s fraternities. It was founded in 1909.
The National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) is comprised of the “Divine Nine,” the historically African American GLOs, four sororities and five fraternities. Several of the NPHC men’s fraternities are also members of the NIC.
Seventeen GLOs comprise the National Association of Latino Fraternal Organizations (NALFO). Several of the NALFO fraternities also belong to the NIC. In 1998, the National Multicultural Greek Council (NMGC) was formed as an umbrella council for a coalition of 12 GLOs.
I think it is the rare individual who could name all the 125+ members of each of these five organizations.
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And how about we make this go viral? https://www.phideltatheta.org/2015/03/message-tyrone-speller-phi-delta-theta-chapter-president-university-oklahoma/
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2015. All Rights Reserved. If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/
