Arizona Cleaver, along with her four friends – Pearl Neal, Myrtle Tyler, Viola Tyler, and Fannie Pettie – are the five pearls of Zeta Phi Beta. They are the organization’s founders. The idea for the organization happened several months earlier when Cleaver was walking with Charles Robert Samuel Taylor, a Phi Beta Sigma at Howard University. Taylor suggested that Cleaver consider starting a sister organization to Phi Beta Sigma.
Although there were already two sororities on the Howard University campus, Cleaver and her four friends were interested and started the process. They sought and were granted approval from university administrators. The five met for the first time as a sanctioned organization on January 16, 1920. They named their organization Zeta Phi Beta. It is the only National Pan-Hellenic Council sorority constitutionally bound to a fraternity; that fraternity is Phi Beta Sigma.
The Five Pearls of Zeta Phi Beta, (l-to-r) Arizona Cleaver Stemons, Viola Tyler Goings, Pearl Anna Neal, Myrtle Tyler Faithful, and Fannie Pettie Watts
Shortly after Zeta Phi Beta’s debut, the other NPHC sororities founded at Howard University, Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha, gave a reception for the Zeta Phi Beta members.
Ophelia Settle Egypt was born in 1903. She was a member of the Alpha Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta and served as its Vice President in 1924. Zora Neale Hurston was in the chapter at the same time and Egypt was interviewed for a book on Hurston.
Ophelia Settle Egypt
She graduated from Howard in 1925 and then three years later earned a Master’s in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1944, she earned another Master’s from the New York School of Social Work. Egypt later obtained an advanced certificate for work toward a Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work. She also had a scholarship to study at Washington University, but because she was a black woman she was required to learn her lessons from a tutor rather than attend class.
She was a sociologist and a social worker. From 1928-30, she conducted interviews with elderly former slaves. The interviews were published in Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves, published by Fisk University. Egypt also had a hand in exposing the Tuskegee syphilis study. She also worked with James Weldon Johnson and later wrote a children’s book about him.
Egypt ended her career as a social worker in Washington, D.C. For 11 years she served as Director of the Planned Parenthood clinic in southeast D.C. In 1981, the clinic was named in her honor. She died in 1984.
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