A trip down memory lane without looking at the dark and less than pleasant things is really no different than walking down Main Street USA at Disneyland.
As much as I love Disneyland, that's not our purpose here. And unfortunately, we find ourselves, once again, with a questionable comment that in our times would be considered quite racist. I'm doing my best to try to look at it through the context of 1922, but no matter how hard I try, I can't rationalize it, and that's why I've chosen to not quote it here.
But now I find myself quite curious about how race relations played into fraternities and sororities. I have known that there were fraternities and sororities specifically for African American and Jewish students; there were a number of each on the campus of my Alma Mater. I'm not naive enough to think that fraternities and sororities weren't segregated, even in states without Jim Crow laws. I had just never thought about it until now and for the sake of this project, I decided to dig deeper.
Stupidly, I started my quest typing into my google search "racism fraternity." It was a query that returned almost 260,000 hits, most of which are undoubtedly referencing recent events.
Narrowing down my search to fraternity and race relationships, I came across this story recounted by James Vorosmarti Jr. of Lafayette College, a brother of Phi Kappa Tau.
http://www.lafayette.edu/news.php/view/10558
His story is not unlike many others I discovered; stories that tell of "gentlemen agreements" that essentially barred chapters from initiating anyone other than christian white males.
In the stories I have read thus far, an awakening among the student population that this was clearly wrong, appears to have took place in the mid-to-late 1950's. The stories tend to mirror Mr. Vorosmarti's experience where certain chapters challenge the national organization on these mandates, and often end up seceding from the national fraternity in protest.
However if this is the case, we have about 30 years of Archi's where we may stumble into pronouncements like the one here on page 4.
I dismayed to discover in the March 15, 1923 issue of the Archi, that our fraternity was not one of the organizations that maintained a racial status quo with a "gentleman's agreement". Instead, being "white male" was listed as one of the requirements for membership in our National Constitution.
Shocking.
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While it is not the last racist statement, I think this probably the worst example in the whole collection of The Archi.
ReplyDelete(There will be some good surprises, too. But I won't try to enumerate them here.)
It's ironic, but the members reviewing the text of that paragraph of the constitution in March 15, 1923 would call the change "inclusive" since it added landscape architecture and interior decoration. Unfortunately at the time, it could have said "white males" or "persons" the assumption was the same.