LITMIR.BIZ

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the opinion of the president with his famous Atlanta Cotton States Exposition speech of the same year, in which he accommodated racial discrimination by explaining that social segregation should be acceptable as long as mutual progress was respected. Thought leaders like Du Bois and Trotter vehemently opposed this viewpoint. Black students who attended the Ivies in the early twentieth century attempted to push the envelope beyond the accommodation of racist treatment.

      The activities of black Cornellians best exemplified the more assertive campaign for racial equality that students made in the new century. Keeping in mind that at least five black students had not returned to Cornell from the previous semester, in the fall of 1905 some remaining students took the initiative to create their own support network. In addition to socializing, the early group members worked to improve their academic opportunities by studying together. The students borrowed a study technique from the members of white fraternities on campus. They banked the tests they took so that black students who took the courses in the future would know how and what to study.15 Current institutions of higher education expend millions of dollars to recreate the academic and student affairs retention models that these isolated black students conceived of for their own survival in 1905–1906.

      Soon afterward, some of the men in the social/study group suggested that it become a literary society that surveyed and discussed the works of black intellectuals. The idea of a literary society was profound in the sense that so many Americans were either illiterate or had little or no time for leisure reading.16 That these black collegians enjoyed such a luxury is telling. Although the members of the group were amenable to adding literary discourse to their meetings, they could not agree on what to name the society. Some members of the group who had been working in white fraternity houses to support themselves wanted to use Greek letters. One group member, a graduate student, disapproved of the idea, claiming that there were no Greek signifiers that could be used for African Americans. After some debate and research, the leading members of the society came up with the name Alpha Phi Alpha.17

      Within months of naming the literary society, at the home of the Singletons on December 4, 1906, seven members established Alpha Phi Alpha as the first collegiate fraternity for black men.18 With the help of members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, students held their first fraternity ritual in an Odd Fellows masonic lodge. The fraternity followed the trail that the founders of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Inc., also known as the Boulé, had blazed in Philadelphia.19 The founders of the Boulé represented the black elite in the professions, with members having attained education at Phillips Exeter, Penn, Harvard, Columbia, and other elite institutions. After their college and academic training, they entered professions in medicine and dentistry while using their status to create more freedoms for people like them. At the collegiate level, the founding members of Alpha Phi Alpha organized around principles of scholarship, uplift, and service to the black community.

      To be sure, the founders of Alpha were the sons of relatively established families, but the students were still only one generation removed from slavery. Various members of their families had served in the Civil War, attended college, taught at the collegiate level, were ministers, and owned businesses.20 The founding members included Henry A. Callis, Charles H. Chapman, Eugene K. Jones, George B. Kelley, Nathaniel A. Murray, Robert H. Ogle, and Vertner W. Tandy. Two were from the South, and the remaining five were from either northern states or the nation’s capital. Of the seven founders, the parents or another close family member attended college at institutions like Hampton, Howard, and Harvard. Two of the founders had attended the M Street School, and two others had attended HBCUs before arriving at Cornell.21 In making the fraternity’s motto “first of all; servants of all; we shall transcend all,” the students were quite aware of their elite status in officially creating a brotherhood for black college men.

      The fraternity also expressed the need to establish networks of fictive kinship on university campuses. Fictive kinship was a survival tool that black people employed for generations. Although universities claimed to adhere to the concept of in loco parentis, black students had to engineer their own family models while on campus—often without the help of their schools’ institutional parenting. When the Cornell administration recognized the fraternity, the members made it a resource for black intellectualism and community progress within and outside of the university. The fraternity quickly expanded to other institutions, creating another chapter on the campus of Howard University and then another at the University of Toronto, making Alpha the first national and international black collegiate fraternity. By the 1920s, the fraternity established chapters at six of the eight American Ivies. In spite of declarations of uplift and service to the community, the founding members wanted to remain somewhat exclusive. Famous historian, Sigma Pi Phi member, and Alpha Phi Alpha member Charles H. Wesley explained that “it was only natural” the founders would turn the fraternity “toward other colleges and universities of the first rank.”22 Additionally, it was important to the fraternity not to admit what one founder called “undesirables.”23 The founders and members of Alpha did not escape notions of elitism even in their good works for the race. Their sentiments echoed those of many from their socioeconomic class during the period. After the founding of Alpha Phi Alpha, students founded other black Greek letter organizations at Howard, the University of Indiana, and Butler University.

      When the founders of Alpha Phi Alpha graduated, they took their place among the race’s leaders and in the professions. Callis, training under the prominent surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, became a physician and charter member of the National Medical Association, which allowed black medical doctors to share information and best practices.24 He had a brief marriage with fellow Cornellian, club woman, and activist Alice Dunbar Nelson, who was formerly married to Paul Laurence Dunbar.25 Chapman became an award winning agriculture professor at Florida A&M, inspiring students and colleagues alike.26 Jones became an executive of a new organization called the National Urban League and a leading figure in the struggle for black rights in New York.27 His son, Eugene Kinkle Jones Jr. graduated Cornell Law School in 1933. George Kelley became the first registered civil engineer in New York and worked on the Barge Canal system.28 He also achieved the rank of second lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I. Murray taught at Dunbar High School (formerly the M Street School) and Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C.29 Ogle moved to the nation’s capital, where he worked as an assistant for Republican U.S. Senator Frances E. Warren who headed the Senate Appropriations Committee.30 Tandy became the first recognized registered architect in the State of New York. Also a prominent member of black New York society, he designed the historic St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal church in Harlem and the palatial homes of black millionaire and mogul Madame C. J. Walker.31 Black Cornell graduates achieved in spite of Jim Crow.

      Back on campus, fraternity members became student leaders. The fraternity put together a “Committee on Student Affairs” to address black student needs. The fraternity’s and committee’s duty was to “promote the scholarship of all the colored students of the university and to promote a sympathetic relationship between the townspeople and the students.” As part of the desegregation generation, black students at Ivy schools believed they had something to prove to their institutions and other observers. In performing at a high level, they understood they were paving the way for other black students to attend and for potential social acceptance at PWIs. Aware that they were on a metaphoric stage, Alpha members offered programs and services “in order that the colored student body may get some recognition in the eyes of the university.” It was vital to modify their behavior and to be as respectable as possible, “for outsiders are quick to criticize and [are] severe in their judgments.” That was why they looked to each other to uphold a standard of decorum that was irreproachable.32 Scholars have argued that artists of the Harlem Renaissance took a similar tack in trying to present to the world the best of black people in the hope that white America may accept black people as being as refined as any other American. For members of the desegregation generation in the Ivy League, the burden of respectability and representation was all but light.

      Cornell women especially shouldered the burden of respectability while overcoming other circumstances that called into question their status as ladies. For the black female students of the university, the issue of housing came to the fore. Between 1911 and 1914 black students at Sage College (Cornell’s school for women) faced issues because of the requirement that female students stay on campus. The earliest black

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