In the latter capacity, she directed the theater debut of two green actors who, hope against hope, wanted to make their mark on the national consciousness: Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. Of course it is more than well-known names, or historic firsts, that make up the meaning of the seventy-five-year-old organization. When, in , those twenty-two students organized Delta Sigma Theta, they added an important and vital dimension to the Black sorority idea —an idea that filled such a compelling need, that gained such wide currency among college-educated women, it became a full-fledged social movement.
Both the Black and White groups shared in common, Greek names; a closed, or exclusive rather than inclusive, membership; and the culture of secret societies replete with rituals, oaths, and symbols.
Members of all the groups had to meet particular criteria and go through novitiate periods where they were subjected to hazing and the discipline and orders of the organization. All were created out of the desire to form social bonds with like-minded students. However, the particular needs of Black students in general, and women in particular, made the history of Black Greek-letter groups distinct both in degree and kind from those of their White counterparts.
The growing but still small numbers of Afro-Americans attending universities in the early twentieth century created a special sense of urgency to form the social bonds with each other that was inherent in the nature of Greek-letter societies.
From , the year that the first Black attained a degree from an American university, to , 7, Blacks had earned academic or professional degrees—the bulk of them in the turn-of-the-century years. By , that figure was Racism, sexism, and the sense of racial obligation were also forces that helped shape the Black Greek-letter groups.
It is interesting to note that the two earliest fraternities were actually established on predominantly White campuses: Alpha Phi Alpha at Cornell University and Kappa Alpha Psi at the University of Indiana. But the early growth of the fraternal organizations, in most instances, was on predominantly White campuses—where there was a greater need for a haven against discrimination.
In such places even the idea of a sorority house had special implications. On many predominantly White campuses, they served not only as centers for social activity, but as the only on campus housing for Black students, who were allowed to matriculate at the schools but not live in their dormitories. The racial environment in which they were conceived also made the groups very conscious of scholarship and achievement, making them closer to honor societies such as Phi Beta Kappa than the more socially oriented White groups.
For many, in fact, who for assorted reasons would never have the chance to hold a Phi Beta Kappa key, the criteria-based membership in a fraternity or sorority became its own evidence of academic distinction. For Black college students, scholarship had a double-edged purpose. It offered proof of their intellectual abilities in a society that doubted them; and as benefactors of a college education—a scarce commodity in the Black community—there was the racial obligation to achieve both on the campus and beyond it and so better lead the others.
There was another dimension to these aspirations too: the right to attain the same intellectual training as that of the best of their White peers. For this reason, Black fraternal groups—conceived at a time when an academic education was widely seen as dangerous, futile, or impractical, for Blacks—had a decidedly liberal arts bent.
Their development was more than an imitation of the White Greek-letter groups that excluded them. Calhoun once opined. Black Greek-letter societies were also calculated to strike a blow against proponents of industrial, nonacademic education for Afro-Americans. The latter included Blacks like Booker T. Washington, who believed the study of classical subjects was of little practical use. Unlike him, those in the Black fraternal groups did not see the irony in, as the Tuskegee educator once noted, the black boy studying Greek, while the Greek boy is blacking shoes.
For Black women, these circumstances had even deeper implications. The tremendous need for instructors who were not only teaching a whole race trying to go to school —as Washington once described the Black hunger for education—but providing important role models, did encourage Black women to study beyond high school. But most were attending normal institutions: two-year schools with limited curricula aimed at preparing teachers.
Mary Church Terrell, who became the first Black woman to serve on a city wide board of education—in Washington, D. Black sororities were also liberal arts oriented and the small numbers of Black women in four-year institutions who sought social bonds and shared experiences gave a particular resonance to their organizations. In general, the sororities often held their members to even stricter academic standards than their male counterparts, although all had similar criteria.
For Black women though, who also saw community service and racial uplift as a vital part of their mission, those standards were often a source of conflict. Especially in the South, where the overwhelming majority of Black people lived, segregation, poverty, and racism prevented many potentially brilliant students from attending prestigious liberal arts institutions. Not until the s were there significant numbers of public high schools in the South, even for Whites. Should the lack of opportunity exclude them from membership?
If not, how could they attain the true honor society dimension of the sororities? When did selectivity go beyond the notion of excellence to embrace elitism and snobbery? The debate touched on an always explosive issue among Blacks: the question of class and color. After all, it was often the Black descendants of White slaveholders who had the earliest opportunities to attain a liberal arts education and learn the social graces. Another layer of complexity was added because of the association of class with morality.
The latter has been a particular preoccupation of Black women because of the widely held stereotypes about their sexual behavior—stereotypes that had horrible and far-reaching consequences. Black sororities have also had to grapple with how the concept of service is translated into political activism. The sorority may be unique among Black purposive organizations as it was not conceived to transform society but to transform the individual. The sorority is a sisterhood, and an enabler that helps individuals to grow through cooperation, leadership development, culture and exposure to the leading figures and issues of the times.
Individually, many members of Black sororities were also active in the NAACP and a host of civil rights organizations on either end of the political spectrum; and organizationally, they have lent financial aid and other means of support to such groups. But the role of the sorority itself in Black political life has been less clear—and in highly charged times of Black militancy, such as the sixties, it has often been thrown into a crisis of identity and relevance as a primarily social organization.
Especially in such periods its exclusive membership, its reluctance to be a vanguard for positions considered radical for the times even those concerning education , and its primary concern for social bonding have drawn sharp criticism from those both within and outside the sorority. This is compounded by the perennial problem of chapters, many of which are small and made up of women with little experience in exercising the political mandates of the national leadership.
Unlike civil rights organizations, for example, which had to alter its goals and leadership style when de jure integration was achieved, the sorority has been relatively immune from having to undergo such changes. Partly for this reason it has not only survived but grown while many other organizations have failed to do so. In , with the founding of the first Black sorority, there were nine women who belonged to a Black Greek-letter organization.
Today, over a quarter of a million women belong to the three major college-based sororities—Delta Sigma Theta, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and Zeta Phi Beta—and their numbers continue to grow. Their viability—despite the changes that two world wars, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and de jure desegregation have wrought—attests to their continuing importance in Black life. So too, does the fact that unlike predominantly White Greek-letter organizations, association with Black groups does not end with graduation from college.
Throughout its seventy-five-year-old history, Delta Sigma Theta has maintained a stable yet dynamic organization that has consistently rendered service to its community. Its leadership is democratically elected by its membership, imbuing it with a legitimacy to represent and speak for a significant constituency of Black women. There are few Black organizations with a more skilled or more coherent membership, or that is less dependent on outside sources, than the Black sorority.
Because of these very reasons, there is a challenge inherent in the Black sorority idea—a challenge that no one understands better than the sorority itself. Its history shows that its vision of itself and what it must do grows with each succeeding decade. From a self-contained group of college students, the sorority took on the goals of public service and support for those organizations that sought political change. Its mandate for the next century, following its own evolutionary path, is to continue its ever-increasing abilities to render public service, and to enlarge its concept to embrace and directly impact on public policy.
In , twenty-two young women, barely out of their adolescent years, founded a sorority that today touches the lives of thousands of women. This book is a history of how that organization was born, the ideas of those twenty-two women, of its struggles, and its attempts to fashion a meaningful life for the community and for themselves from the raw material of denial.
When I look at you, I see myself. Oh to Be a Delta Girl! During the twentieth century, black Greek-Letter organizations BGLOs united college students dedicated to excellence, fostered kinship, and uplifted African Americans. Members of these organizations include remarkable and influential individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. Despite the. With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability.
Find out more about OverDrive accounts. Last edited by BorrowBot. April 16, History. By Paula Giddings. Go to the editions section to read or download ebooks. In search of sisterhood Paula Giddings. Want to Read. Are you sure you want to remove In search of sisterhood from your list? Your email address will not be published. Home your the read life and how movie for with free what about quotes book you love pdf. Giddings This history of the largest block womens organization in the United States is not only the story of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority DST , but also tells of the increasing involvement of black women in the political, social, and economic affairs of America.
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