“Who Thinks of the Rights and Feelings of Others”
More than forty freshman fraternity pledges gathered in the cavernous dance hall of their University of Oklahoma chapter house as upperclassmen stood on a balcony. When the pledges looked up, they could see a Sigma Alpha Epsilon crest and its symbols of honor: a knight, a shield, and a phoenix rising from the ashes, representing the fraternity’s post–Civil War revival. The students knew they were lucky to be part of such an august institution. On the glorious fall days when the Oklahoma Sooners played home football games, alumni would gather to drink beer and whiskey, listen to live music, reminisce about their days in the chapter, and exchange stories of boom and bust in the oil patch. When the chapter house opened in 1965, the beige brick split-level residence, built in the Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie Style, had inspired wonder and envy on Oklahoma’s leafy fraternity row. Relying on wealthy alumni and financial backing from the university, it had cost the equivalent of $4 million today. A high wall ringed the house, reinforcing a sense of exclusivity and secrecy, as if it were a diplomatic compound in some faraway capital. Almost twice the size of the Oklahoma governor’s mansion, the house boasted air-conditioning, a poolroom, and a multiplex stereo system. It slept eighty, including suites for its president, treasurer, and house mother.
The setting reflected the chapter’s prestige and influence, which rivaled the grandest Southern houses. To a degree not fully appreciated by outsiders, members of SAE had helped build the state’s flagship campus in Norman, about twenty miles south of Oklahoma City. The university’s art museum was named after Fred Jones Jr., an SAE member who died in a plane crash in 1950 during his senior year. His parents, who made a fortune running one of the nation’s largest networks of Ford auto dealerships, donated the money for the building. Two members of the chapter belonged to the family that founded Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores, a main sponsor of Sooners athletics and a major donor to the university. Another SAE alumnus used his private jet to fly football coaches on scouting trips. SAE members sat on the board of the university’s charitable foundation, and many others could be counted among the university’s most loyal donors. The young men on the dance floor that evening in February 2015 knew they were now part of a tradition that could take them as far as they wished to go in Oklahoma—and beyond.
The pledges were there to learn a tradition essential to SAE, which is often called the “Singing Fraternity” because it treasures its songbook almost as much as its True Gentleman creed. The upperclassmen began the songfest with the standards that had long defined what it means to be a member of SAE. They belted out a feisty fight song featuring the SAE motto, Phi Alpha.
They sang melodies for sorority serenades such as “Violets,” which members have been crooning on bended knee for generations.
Violet, Violet,
You’re the fairest flower to me.
Violet, Violet,
Emblem of fraternity.
With your perfume memories come,
Of Sigma Alpha Epsilon,
Dearest flower beneath the sun,
My Violet.
And they sang “Friends,” perhaps SAE’s defining song, its lyrics gracing all manner of celebrations, inspiring men to reach their arms around each other and express a sentimentality not usually seen among modern college students.
Friends, friends, friends,
You and I will be,
Whether in fair or in dark stormy weather,
We’ll stand or we’ll fall together,
For SAE.
After the pledges practiced the favorites, they heard muffled conversation high above them from the upperclassmen leaders on the balcony. It sounded like an argument about the song they would teach next. Then, they heard an instruction.
“Make sure you don’t sing this song outside of these walls.”
The tune, “If You’re Happy and You Know it, Clap Your Hands,” may have evoked their childhoods. But the lyrics reached farther back into history with raw and toxic words that flowed downward, like the currents of a polluted river from the 1950s.
There will never be a nigger in SAE,
There will never be a nigger in SAE,
You can hang him from a tree,
But he can never sign with me,
There will never be a nigger in SAE.
The song had traveled an unusual route. Members of this chapter had first heard it in 2011 at their annual Caribbean leadership cruise. It wasn’t part of the official curriculum, and it wasn’t in any SAE songbook. Members from another chapter, likely from Texas or Louisiana, had taught it to the University of Oklahoma students. No doubt, the members learned it furtively on that cruise ship, whose passengers included African American tourists, as well as black members of SAE. By the winter of 2015, the song had become part of the chapter’s underground ritual. Just about every member had heard it at least once before in a session just like this one. The chapter didn’t have a single African American member, a student whose very presence might have killed that song or perhaps driven racist students away.
The next month, SAE’s Founders Day, March 9, fell on a Monday. One of the most important dates on the fraternity’s calendar, it celebrated SAE’s birthday in 1856 at the University of Alabama. On the Saturday evening before Founders Day, members of the University of Oklahoma chapter and their guests “pre-gamed”—or loaded up on liquor—at the house before setting off for an Oklahoma City country club for their celebration. The members dressed in black tie, and their dates wore formal dresses and heels, as they boarded charter buses parked near the house. Before the event, upperclassmen told pledges to impress their dates with singing. Don’t let anyone look like a jerk when he stands up to lead the bus in song, the leaders warned. On board one of those buses, twenty-five members sitting with their dates launched into the old standards, just as they had in the dance hall the month before. Then, they added some raunchy favorites, including songs making fun of rival fraternities. After a while, the men seemed to be losing steam. A twenty-year-old sophomore named Levi Pettit stepped into the void.
Pettit, who had been a top golfer at the Highland Park High School in Dallas, was a fraternity leader, its rush chairman, and the person responsible for recruitment. Unsteady, clearly drunk, he let loose the song that was supposed to stay inside the house. One of the freshmen, Parker Rice, who had graduated from a Jesuit prep school in Dallas, stood to join him. They began lustily: “There will never be a nigger…”
Some members—it wasn’t clear how many—joined in or clapped rhythmically. Sitting toward the back of the bus, Corina Hernandez was horrified. A Mexican American student from Oklahoma State University, she was visiting her friend Garrett Parkhurst, a freshman member of SAE. They had gone to high school together, and the two had just begun to date. A high school beauty queen who now belonged to the historically white Kappa Delta sorority, Hernandez was comfortable in Greek life. But she had never heard such ugly language before, and now she felt threatened as she looked around the bus and saw only white faces. “I’m so sorry,” Parkhurst told her, again and again. It wasn’t clear how many people had joined the singing. Parkhurst hadn’t. Neither had several of his friends, who had been more focused on their dates than the singing. Still, no one said anything. No one stopped the song; no one objected. The moment passed. They put it behind them, just as they had moved on from the song in the balcony the month before. The members and their dates enjoyed a night of dancing at the country club.
The next morning, Sunday, a cell-phone video appeared online. It wasn’t clear who had taken the video and then posted it, but Unheard, a group of black University of Oklahoma students, distributed it on Twitter. Nine seconds long and shaky, the video showed Pettit and Rice, drunk and tuxedo-clad, leading the bus in the song. It quickly went viral, bringing national outrage to the campus of the University of Oklahoma. There were protest marches, television trucks on campus, and international news coverage. By Sunday evening, SAE’s national board, calling the video “disgusting,” voted to close the chapter and expel all members, saying its behavior wasn’t consistent with the values of the True Gentleman.
College leaders have often been criticized for tepid, slow responses in crises. Not University of Oklahoma president David Boren, who had a politician’s understanding of what had happened and the damage it could do to the university. Boren, the college’s president since 1994, was a former Oklahoma governor and senator, a powerful Democratic figure in the state and in Washington. On Monday, he said he was severing all ties with the SAE chapter. Because the university had helped finance the house and leased the land to the chapter, Boren could take even more decisive action. He shut the house and ordered all students to remove their belongings by midnight the next day. Boren said he would expel Pettit and Rice for creating a hostile environment under federal civil-rights law. “To those who have misused their free speech in such a reprehensible way, I have a message for you,” Boren said. “You are disgraceful. You have violated all that we stand for. You should not have the privilege of calling yourselves ‘Sooners.’ Real Sooners are not racist. Real Sooners are not bigots.”
Members of SAE received death threats, and some were afraid to go to classes. Vandals ran their keys along the exteriors of cars belonging to a fraternity with similar letters. The University of Oklahoma football team canceled practice, dressed in black, and took to the field, standing arm in arm, for a moment of silence.
SAE alumni had hoped their past backing of the university would temper Boren’s response to the video. But Boren went further than most college presidents who condemn a chapter’s behavior, making an extraordinary repudiation of the once-powerful fraternity. In his seventies, Boren was nearing the end of his tenure. While he held office, he didn’t see SAE returning to the University of Oklahoma.
THE RACIST SONG captured in that nine-second video has come to define SAE’s image. It has proved more damaging to its reputation than deadly alcohol poisonings, hazing rituals that include cattle prods, burning with irons, and force-feeding of cat food, or even the re-designation of the SAE acronym as “Sexual Assault Expected.” Like the footage documenting police killings of unarmed black suspects after traffic stops, the video revealed something raw and real about race that couldn’t be dismissed. It resonated because it reflected a truth about fraternities’ failure to confront their own histories as white-only organizations.
Such behavior flourishes in part because Greek life remains so segregated. Although fraternities generally aren’t required to disclose demographic data, studies show that traditional fraternities skew white. At Princeton University, three-fourths of the members of fraternities and sororities in 2009 were white, compared with half of the overall student body. Matthew Hughey, a sociologist now at the University of Connecticut, studied Greek life at three unnamed East Coast colleges and found rigid segregation. The few minority students who entered white fraternities confronted persistent racial stereotyping, which they tolerated because they valued the superior resources and networking opportunities of membership. On average, 4 percent of members of the historically white fraternities he studied were minorities—or roughly two in a chapter of sixty-three, according to his study, published in 2010. Hughey called the system “a form of American apartheid.”
These divisions promote intolerance. Traditional fraternities are among the most “racially isolating environments for white students,” according to a 2014 study of twenty-eight selective colleges. Ninety-seven percent of the students said their Greek organizations were predominantly white. Those who joined were less likely to have at least one close friend from another race or ethnicity. “Campus educators need to ask serious questions about whether Greek life in its current form is counterproductive to the university’s commitments to preparing students for engagement in a diverse democracy,” wrote Julie Park, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland.
An earlier study that tracked more than 2,000 University of California at Los Angeles students over four years of college came to a similar conclusion. The authors, including psychology professors from UCLA and Claremont McKenna College, found a campus where student organizations fostered racial divisions. Minority students joined minority organizations, including African American fraternities, whereas white students flocked to traditional Greek organizations. Fraternities and sororities attracted men and women with both a sense of white racial identity and opposition to affirmative action and other policies promoting diversity. Fraternities and sororities “in part function as ethnic clubs for White students” the researchers found. “Our results suggest that Greek student organizations also appear to be nurseries for the sense of White victimization.” By contrast, racial prejudice decreased with exposure to ethnically diverse roommates, friends, and romantic partners. The study proposed that colleges promote random roommate assignments or the intentional mixing of races in living arrangements—precisely the opposite of what happens at most Greek organizations. Colleges, by their own account, exist to promote the free exchange of ideas; the US Supreme Court has repeatedly hailed diversity among students as essential for the education of a workforce that will survive in a global marketplace. Yet fraternities, by custom and structure, often work to undermine racial understanding.
In the most extreme cases, these racial divisions provoke violence. A 2014 study of FBI hate-crime statistics from 349 colleges concluded that campuses with large populations of historically white fraternities are more likely to report verbal and physical assaults involving bias against blacks and other underrepresented groups. “The presence of fraternities is associated with a campus climate that is more dangerous for minority group members,” concluded the sociologists Nella Van Dyke at the University of California at Merced and Griff Tester, now at Central Washington University. “A large Greek system may be both a contributor and a product of a campus culture marked by in-group/out-group animosity.”
SAE itself could be considered ground zero for this kind of animosity. Immediately after the video became public, news accounts could find many previous episodes that pointed to a tolerance of racist behavior at SAE. In 1982, the University of Cincinnati chapter held a Martin Luther King “trash party,” where guests were asked to bring items such as a Ku Klux Klan hood, fried chicken, and a canceled welfare check. An SAE chapter at Texas A&M in 1992 had a “Jungle Fever” party featuring blackface, grass skirts, and “slave hunts.” In December 2014, the SAE chapter at Clemson University threw a “Cripmas party,” one of many “ghetto”-themed parties at historically white fraternities that have angered black students. At Oklahoma State University, until the bus video became public, SAE had long held a “Plantation Ball” to commemorate the fraternity’s founding. These theme parties suggest a broad acceptance of offensive attitudes.
In other cases, fraternity members targeted individual black students. In 1990, a drunk member of the Kansas University chapter of SAE harassed a black sophomore who was delivering pizzas to the house. He allegedly pushed her down the stairs and called her a “nigger bitch.” After campus protests, the member, who resigned from SAE, was charged with disorderly conduct and battery and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. In 2006, an African American graduate of the University of Memphis said she attended an SAE party with her white SAE boyfriend, where they were both called “fucking niggers.” Her boyfriend quit the fraternity after the chapter told him only to date white women, according to her account. This episode attracted far less attention than the video in Oklahoma because it lacked visual documentation. But it sounded most similar in its echo of what many would have thought a bygone era.
Even after the Oklahoma video surfaced and SAE members across the country pledged to fight racism, accusations mounted. Eight months later, an African American student from Columbia University said she was turned away from a Halloween party at Yale’s SAE chapter after she was told it was “white girls only.” The chapter, noting it had black members, denied her account, and Yale said its own investigation found no evidence of systematic discrimination against minorities at the party. Still, the episode became part of a broad debate that dominated the news about insensitivity toward minorities on the Yale campus, political correctness, and free speech. At the same time as the SAE controversy, a lecturer in early childhood education, who oversaw one of Yale’s residence halls with her husband, a Yale professor, sent an e-mail questioning administrators’ advice about avoiding culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. After a firestorm, the couple resigned from their positions.
While the facts of the SAE situation at Yale may have been muddy, two other episodes appeared more clear-cut. In February 2016, two white SAE members at the University of Texas at Austin were charged with public intoxication and deadly conduct and expelled from the chapter after they allegedly threw glass bottles and yelled, “Fuck you, nigger,” at a black student. Later that year, the University of Wisconsin at Madison suspended its SAE chapter after a black member said he had been subjected to eighteen months of harassment, including being called racial epithets. (He also reported that members used homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs.) In one case, he said, a white member at a Halloween party addressed him with a racial slur and choked him until other members intervened. Members seemed to enjoy making racially insensitive statements, according to the black student’s account. They would often use a racial or homophobic slur, then try to absolve themselves by saying: “No offense.” The Wisconsin case reflected the blurring of the line between “politically incorrect” behavior and racism that the 2016 presidential campaign revealed.
SAE was by no means alone in this kind of behavior. Consider just two episodes from 2014. That year, three members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon chapter at the University of Mississippi plotted to tie a noose around the neck of a statue of James Meredith, the school’s first black student. At Lehigh University, Sigma Chi members spray-painted racial slurs and threw eggs at a multicultural residence hall. Yet these cases obscure a more nuanced picture of the racial reality of historically white fraternities, which have accepted some minority members and instituted programs promoting diversity. In fact, two years before the Oklahoma incident, the SAE national organization surveyed its chapters about their racial composition—strong evidence of the fraternity’s concern. SAE found that 3 percent of its members were African Americans, a cohort that makes up 14 percent of the four-year college population. SAE had signed up far more Latino and Asian American members. Overall, about 20 percent were members of minority groups, which compose 38 percent of the college population. These figures showed SAE had plenty of work to do, as did many liberal arts colleges with similar demographics. Chapters showed significant variation. Some major outposts in the South reported no black members. Others, especially those on the West Coast, such as California State University at San Marco and Occidental College in Los Angeles, were much more diverse. Amid all the condemnation of SAE at Oklahoma, it was rarely noted that the national organization itself shut down the chapter hours after leaders heard about the video—and the day before the University of Oklahoma took action.
I was particularly interested in the experiences of black SAE members, many of whom stood by the fraternity after the video. Most had joined because of their network of friends and paid little attention to SAE’s history. Their comments suggested how much a fraternity’s culture depended on the campus equivalent of retail politics—face-to-face meetings and hanging around together. McHenry Ternier, a freshman at the University of Rhode Island’s chapter, where half of its members belonged to minority groups, went on television to defend the chapter. “The campus supported us. They knew who we were,” Ternier, who is African American, told me. Will Davis, a senior from Illinois State, found himself in a tough position when the Oklahoma video hit the Internet. He was one of three black students who were about to start a new Illinois State chapter just as the video became infamous. “Why would you want to join a racist fraternity?” he remembered a friend asking. “I spent three or four days asking myself if I wanted to be part of SAE.” For Davis, the answer was yes; he had many friends among the sixty members of the new chapter, which took part in a demonstration called “Not on Our Campus,” that pledged “our fraternal community’s commitment to creating a safe, diverse, supportive and inclusive environment.” Davis had many qualities that would make him a good fit for SAE. He grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, where he was comfortable living in a predominantly white community. SAE respects athleticism, ambition, and military service. A six-foot-two linebacker for the Illinois State Redbirds, Davis was planning to join the US Air Force and then apply to medical school. Still, Davis harbored no illusions about the challenges SAE faced. “Greek life is very segregated,” he said. “It’s always been that way. It’s part of their history.”
In June 2015, I met Davis at the biennial SAE national convention, where hundreds of students and alumni gathered to chart the fraternity’s future. Held at a Newport Beach, California, resort, the proceedings were uneasy at times because of the Oklahoma video’s release three months earlier. I watched an alumnus of the University of Oklahoma chapter screen another video—in a sense, a sequel. He was the father of one of the members on the bus, and he hoped this new video would quell the accusations of racism. The video’s lighting was harsh and unforgiving, as if the students were confessing to a crime. In effect, they were. They admitted their silence when confronted with racism.
“Any type of discrimination is not OK.”
“It’s not OK to stand idly by.”
“We embarrassed ourselves and our families.”
“We should have stopped the chant before it got to the bus.”
“Our biggest failure was not stopping it from being shared.”
“The chant does not represent our values.”
“Even though I only heard the chant once before, I knew it was wrong.”
“There’s not a racist culture in our house. We regularly opened the house to African Americans.”
The video, expected to make the rounds of SAE as a cautionary tale, inspired conflicting emotions. The students sounded sincere, their shame as visible as the dark shadows under their eyes. Yet they struck some discordant notes. They had heard the song only “once before.” Wasn’t once more than enough to sing about lynching black people? What does it mean that they didn’t have “a racist culture”? They didn’t object to that song being taught at their own chapter house? What else would a “racist culture” entail in 2015? It seemed odd to have to say that “we regularly opened the house to African Americans.”
After seeing the students’ apologies, I decided to travel to Oklahoma to meet them. What I found there would surprise me.
WITH ITS TURRETS and gargoyles, the Bizzell Memorial Library stands at the center of the University of Oklahoma campus and holds the state’s largest collection of books, 5 million volumes, including Melville and Dickens first editions. For all its academic prestige, the library also represents a troubling racial history. In 1948, George McLaurin, a retired professor, applied to the university’s doctoral program in education. He was at first denied admission because he was African American. Eventually, he was accepted under court order. Still, the university insisted that he remain apart from the white students. McLaurin was forced to sit in a designated spot in the Bizzell Library, away from the regular reading room. His appeal to the Supreme Court became a central part of the reversal of the “separate but equal” doctrine in higher education.
Today, students of all races and backgrounds mingle in Bizzell Library, but their apparent ease belies the racial tensions that still exist at the university. In November 2015, eight months after SAE’s racist song became public, I met a white sophomore named Drew Rader outside the library. Rader, who had been on the bus that fateful evening, wore a faded rose-colored T-shirt emblazoned with SAE’s letters and an eight-ball, a memento from a 2014 casino night fund-raiser. No one noticed his clothing as he walked across the campus during a class change as students streamed by in Oklahoma sweatshirts.
Since the chapter had been shut down, Rader was living off campus. To sit down for a talk, he took me instead to Headington Hall, a luxurious new $75 million dorm where he and two other SAE pledges had lived freshman year. With its suites, leather furniture, and wood paneling, as well as an eighty-seat movie theater, it was built as an athletic dorm to lure football players. Under National Collegiate Athletic Association rules, half of its rooms had to house non-athletes, and Rader and his friends lucked out, living here and then winning bids (invitations to join) so they could move to the chapter house sophomore year. This dorm, with its view of the football stadium, represented the powerful nexus of fraternities and football at Oklahoma and most public universities with big-time sports. Not only did an SAE family sponsor the football team, the family of one of Rader’s pledge brothers had donated money for Headington Hall and was one of the team’s biggest boosters. Now this symbiotic relationship had broken down. The football team, composed of many African Americans, had excoriated SAE after the video. As we settled down in a conference room, team members walked by after workouts while Rader and his pledge brothers gathered to speak with me.
Rader told me about hearing the racist song shouted from the balcony of the dance hall. “I didn’t take it seriously,” Rader said. “I didn’t put any thought into it. It didn’t trigger anything in my mind as being a threat. It was taught in a joking manner. It wasn’t taught as a serious thing—like we were never going to let in a black person. That would be ridiculous.” Rader seemed blasé about what had happened. Although he considered the song offensive, it seemed to have little literal meaning to him beyond a kind of adolescent stupidity. Rader said he and his date, a member of the Delta Gamma sorority who was now his girlfriend, hadn’t heard the song on the bus.
Rader belonged to the President’s Leadership Class, an elite and diverse group of about one hundred students chosen for their academic and other accomplishments. Its members included J. D. Baker, an African American student who had been Rader’s friend since high school, where they had met at a student-government competition. In the view of the UCLA researchers, these kinds of interactions were essential for improving the racial climate on college campuses. After Rader saw the video, he texted Baker and other black friends to apologize, then met with them face-to-face. Rader remembered his black friends as understanding, but when I spoke later with Baker, he had a different recollection.
“You had the opportunity to show leadership on that bus,” Baker recalled telling him. “If you had stood up on that bus, everything would have been different. Everything would have been different for your fraternity. Everything would have been different for the entire university.”
Still, Baker, a member of the Black Students Association, was far less shocked about the video than the rest of the country. The child of a firefighter and a cosmetologist, he had grown up in a suburb of Oklahoma City and had heard that kind of language before. As one of four African American members of Lambda Chi Alpha, a historically white fraternity with a two-hundred-student chapter, he was open to friendships with white students. It wasn’t always easy. Baker was often subjected to stereotyping. He wore black glasses and favored cardigans and neat jeans, so his fraternity brothers often called him an “Oreo.” “‘You act white, but you’re black,’” they told him. Most of the time, he just laughed it off.
Given Baker’s ability to live in both worlds, it was easy to imagine how his friendship with Rader could have deepened throughout college in a way that might have helped Rader take a stand against the song. Instead, the two students came away with nearly opposite lessons. Baker focused on his friend’s failure to show leadership and stand up for racial tolerance, while Rader nursed a grievance.
In Rader’s view, the university had punished fraternity members excessively, while another privileged group on campus, student athletes, received preferential treatment. Rader noted the lax discipline of star Oklahoma Sooners football player Joe Mixon, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to a misdemeanor charge after punching a female student in the face and fracturing her jaw and cheekbone. The running back, who is African American, was suspended for a year. He returned for the 2015 season and became a top National Football League prospect, though the controversy over the assault continued to dog him. “It seems like there was a double standard,” Rader told me. An aspiring lawyer, Rader wrote a paper for his English class that compared Mixon’s punishment with the expulsion of his two fraternity brothers for singing the offensive song. Rader argued that President Boren had violated the students’ constitutional rights to free speech, a position that a number of legal scholars had taken after the episode. In his view, the university gave an athlete a pass because of his financial value to the university. “When Joe Mixon can be forgiven after brutally assaulting a female, and other students can be expelled for saying unsavory words, there is clearly a problem,” Rader wrote. His professor gave him an A. “Personally, I thought it was an overreaction,” Rader said of the uproar over the video.
Rader’s reasoning typified much of what I heard after fraternities faced censure for their members’ behavior. Defenders will often highlight the transgressions of another group, such as athletes, and suggest that in comparison, they are being unfairly punished. In Mixon’s case, the comparison implied that a black student had been excused for violence, whereas white students had been expelled for mere words. It also selected another privileged group, star athletes, and suggested white fraternities should be treated with the same leniency. Boren, the University of Oklahoma president, told me he had also shown compassion to the two SAE students by allowing them to withdraw before being expelled, so they could start over at another college. “People want to say you’re soft on African Americans but you’re tough on whites,” Boren said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Apart from the debate over punishment, Rader felt Pettit and Rice were taking a fall, when they were no more responsible than anyone else. Rader considered Rice a close friend; Pettit’s aunt and Rader’s mother had been college classmates. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Rader said of the two expelled students. “It made it sound like they were the only two singing.”
Two other SAE members, Garrett Parkhurst and Sam Albert, grew up with Rader in Elk City, Oklahoma, population 12,000. They all played on the high school tennis team. Parkhurst was the student who had apologized to his Mexican American date on the bus. Although he hadn’t said anything at the dance hall, Parkhurst said he understood the gravity of the song. He thought it would have come up at the next chapter meeting if the video hadn’t surfaced. “I knew immediately this was a terrible thing, and it wasn’t going to end well,” Parkhurst told me.
Sam Albert was a year older and hadn’t been on the bus that night. He could barely keep his emotions in check when he described his shame at what happened. His father, who owns a store that sells outdoor clothing and cowboy boots, had been treasurer of the chapter. Albert first visited the house when he was seven years old; his father had showed him the room he had lived in as a student. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Albert said. “I looked up to him so much.”
Albert had a special perspective. His great-grandparents were immigrants who had fled Lebanon in the 1900s. He grew up hearing stories about how the Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross on his family’s Kansas lawn in the 1930s. Just like his younger friends, Albert, who was now a junior, had heard the song in the dance hall when he was a pledge. “I’m not in a place to do something about it,” he recalled thinking at the time. “I’m a freshman, and they probably don’t like me and wouldn’t listen to me. Once I’m an upperclassman I’m going to step up and say something when I have some power and people know who I am. This has got to stop.” He heard about the video at a church breakfast and called his parents. “I was so embarrassed,” he said. Albert’s account demonstrated how the hierarchical structure of fraternities—especially pledging—can strip recruits of their moral compass. Just as they don’t step in when witnessing violent hazing, they remain silent when confronted with racism. I found Albert’s account especially affecting because he understood he had abandoned his family’s values to win acceptance from his peers.
As we spoke, another student, Jack Counts III, joined the group. At the California SAE convention, his father, a chapter alumnus, had screened the film of Counts and other students apologizing. Like Rader, Counts belonged to the President’s Leadership Class. Counts recalled that he and other pledges on the dance floor had noted the bad timing when older students taught the song from the balcony: “People were saying, ‘This is bad. It was close to Martin Luther King’s birthday. This is something we shouldn’t be doing.’” Yet Counts said he felt powerless as a pledge and expressed the same feelings of inferiority that can lead students to accept hazing. “I didn’t know a lot of upperclassmen,” he said. “I mostly got in because my dad was an SAE. You don’t want to say something. You want to stay out of it. Now, if I were in this situation again, I hope I’d step up and say something.”
Counts said he realized it was hard to explain everyone’s silence and that anything he might say now would ring hollow. After the episode, members had met with a Southern Methodist University professor named Maria Dixon Hall, who had publicly expressed sympathy for the white students in the aftermath of the video. Hall, who is African American, had opposed the expulsion of the two members. She chalked up the incident to the immaturity of adolescent boys unduly shaped by the culture around them. “Since we know we all have said things behind closed doors that would have us vilified if they ever saw the light of day, how about we cut these boys a little slack,” she wrote in a piece for a religious website. Young white men are prone to suffer what she called “a full blown cardiac arrest of racism. Rather than give them a defibrillator of God’s grace and challenging them to see the worth of all—we pull the plug and do a dance on their graves.” In her session with SAE members, Dixon said she knew how difficult it was to stand up to right a wrong, to stop a fight or a crime in progress. She urged them to learn from their silence. Counts’s father told me he saw members crying at the meeting.
Some African American community leaders were also forgiving. In a news conference, black civil-rights figures and pastors in Oklahoma appeared with Pettit, who had led the chant. “All the apologies in the world won’t change what I have done, so I will spend the rest of my life trying to be the person who heals and brings people of all races together,” Pettit said. Rice issued a written apology: “I admit it likely was fueled by alcohol consumed at the house before the bus trip, but that’s not an excuse. Yes, the song was taught to us, but that too doesn’t work as an explanation… My goal for the long-term is to be a man who has the heart and the courage to reject racism wherever I see or experience it in the future.”
The other SAE members told me the video didn’t reflect the racial climate at the chapter. Counts said SAE had been recruiting an African American student before the video became public. They recalled that many African American members of the football team had been regulars at their parties. “We had the entire starting defensive line at the house,” Parkhurst said. “I wish they had stood up for us. It hurts a little bit.” Sterling Shepard, a star wide receiver for Oklahoma who has since joined the New York Giants, had been friends with white fraternity members, and Counts’s father told me the fraternity had extended Shepard a bid, which he had declined. Shepard, who is African American, and Counts had graduated from the same Oklahoma City private school, Heritage Hall. “Football and basketball players had been friends with people in the house, and they didn’t do anything to defend guys in the house,” Counts said.
Given the content of the video, that would have been a lot to ask. Shepard’s comment on Twitter had been muted: “It’s sad that it’s 2015 and stuff like this is still happening.” Another high-profile player had been particularly horrified because he knew members; if anything, the betrayal felt more personal. After the video, Erik Striker, a linebacker and team captain, texted his mother and called her in tears. He then unleashed a video on Snapchat that went viral, attacking white fraternities for “telling us racism doesn’t exist,” chanting the song in private and, in public, “shaking our hand, giving us hugs and telling us you love us.”
The football players had been shocked in part because they expected better. I could see why. The members I met seemed open-minded and reflective. They had friendships that crossed racial lines. Given the right role models, they might well have learned to stand up for different values. The fraternity had let them down.
THE DAY AFTER I met with the students, I visited Counts’s father, Jack Counts Jr., whose loyalty to SAE has been a defining aspect of his life. Counts greeted me at his photography company, Candid Color Systems, in a nondescript office park in Oklahoma City. The idea for his company, whose bread and butter is photographing fraternity and sorority members, graduations, and sports, began when he was an Oklahoma SAE and made extra money photographing sorority women at pajama parties for 75 cents apiece. In preparation for our meeting, Counts had laid out generations of SAE memorabilia in velvet-covered scrapbooks adorned with gold crests. Counts, who is in his late sixties, flipped through a yearbook and found a picture of his grandfather, a student senate president who had been one of the first presidents of the Oklahoma chapter. His son would have been the fourth generation at the chapter.
“These traditions go back to the founding of the university,” Counts told me. “It tears you up inside that this happened. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This wasn’t what we were about.”
The former SAE social chairman has shown his devotion to the university in many ways. Five months after my visit, President Boren inducted Counts into the Seed Sower Society, meaning he had given at least $1 million to the University of Oklahoma. In his case, he was singled out for support of athletics, including the Headington Hall project and the Sooner Air Program. Counts ferries coaches around on his Cessna jet when they make scouting missions to high schools across the country.
Counts picked up a dog-eared purple volume, entitled the “Songs of Sigma Alpha Epsilon,” published in 1921. “I can tell you I took a look through it to try to find that song,” he told me. “It wasn’t anywhere.”
Some of the lyrics have a nostalgic Southern flavor, such as “The Beacon Song”: “In the happy, sunny South, SAE first saw the light / And arose to be a beacon in the land.” There is also the old standard, “Sing, Brothers, Sing,” a rousing work that evokes straw hats and barbershop quartets:
When we came up from Dixie land a score of years ago,
Our rivals met us with a band; They thought we were a show.
But they were very wrong, you know, to do the way they did,
They are just forty times too slow, for we get the men they bid,
I tell you…
Sing, brothers, sing; Sing brothers sing;
And let Phi Alpha Ring. Sing, Brothers, Sing.
I asked Counts to play the video of his son and his friends apologizing, so I could look at it more carefully and match names to faces. After we watched it together, Counts, normally upbeat and garrulous, found himself at a loss for words. “It makes me want to cry,” he said. “These guys…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
On a break for lunch, Counts introduced me to his old friend and SAE fraternity brother, Rusty Johnson, a Vietnam veteran who now owns an oil and gas company with one hundred wells. We met at Earl’s Rib Palace, on a commercial strip near his office. With a mostly male clientele, it was the kind of place where the waitress calls you “Baby” and hub caps and license plates decorate the walls. The men reminisced about the annual trips they took to Las Vegas with their 1960s pledge brothers.
“My badge was a big deal for me,” said Johnson, who can count a dozen family members who belonged to SAE. “It was a big deal when I pinned my badge on my oldest and youngest sons. Once they earned the badges, it’s really special to pin it on them. It was really one of the highlights of my life.”
Counts and Johnson are part of a group of SAE alumni who were quietly trying to bring the chapter back to the campus. They needed to strike a delicate balance because they know how precarious their position has become. Although some alumni criticized Boren for what he said after the video became public, Counts was far more measured. “He’s been a great president,” Counts said. “He needed to take quick action, but I think he painted all SAEs with a broad brush that wasn’t fair.” Counts said a college wouldn’t shut down a football team because of a few players’ behavior. “What’s the statute of limitations for a nine-second video?” Johnson asked. “I can guarantee you that you get a bunch of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old guys together for a while and somebody is going to do something stupid. What happened at OU could have happened anywhere.” It sounded like the rationale I heard about drinking: everybody does it, and fraternities are scapegoats. It was worth asking the question: Would the song have flourished anywhere? Would it have survived at a school without fraternities or pledging?
Johnson and Counts acknowledged how the chapter’s recruitment strategy thwarted diversity. “We gave preference to legacies, so a lot of pledges would end up being white guys from large metropolitan areas,” Counts said. At times, he sounded like a college admissions officer interested in promoting a class more reflective of the general population. “We would like to see more ethnic diversity,” he said. “We would like to see more geographic diversity, too.” In Counts’s view, that kind of membership would have saved the chapter. “If we had five black guys in the house, would that song have ever existed?” he said. “Nope. It is sort of self-correcting. People aren’t going to offend their friends.” Counts’s point rang true; a diverse membership would certainly have saved the chapter.
SAE was hardly the only segregated fraternity. After the racist video surfaced, the University of Oklahoma’s Student Affairs Office surveyed its Greek Row and discovered that many other traditionally white fraternities had no black members. By 2017, amid a university push for diversity, all but two chapters included some African American members. Still, overall, blacks amounted to less than 3 percent of members. (The chapters had many more Latinos and Native Americans.) President Boren told me African American enrollment at the university had risen since the incident because families appreciated the stand the school had taken. “It was like we declared war on intolerance,” Boren said. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons.”
COUNTS HAD INVITED me to a tailgate and home football game, something of a state holiday in Oklahoma. That Saturday, several dozen SAE boosters drank beer and soda on a parking lot under a tent in the colors of the American flag. It was a low-key affair because the fraternity had been banned from the campus, and members were gathering just a few blocks from President Boren’s house. Most were alumni, although sorority women and a few undergraduate members showed up, some wearing Game Day polo shirts with subtle SAE logos. Near the tent, Howard Dixon, the former SAE chef, grilled bratwurst. The Jamaican-born Dixon worked for fifteen years at the chapter house, where he was known for his chicken fried steak and chicken and waffles. Dixon wore an SAE lion necklace, a gift from one of the members. Among the tall, athletic guests, the five-foot-tall Dixon stood out. He was also the only black person at the gathering, as he often was in the fraternity house. Dixon lost his job when the university shut the chapter down. Members raised tens of thousands of dollars for him, and another Greek house promptly hired him. In her essay, the Southern Methodist University professor had suggested the members of the chapter, rather than be expelled, meet with their beloved cook, who might ask: “Is this what you really think of me?” I asked Dixon about the song. Like the pastors and civil-rights leaders, he offered forgiveness. “We all need to love each other,” he told me. “When you cut yourself, you bleed red. So do I. Accidents happen. I’m just glad I can be here to help. As long as there is SAE, I’ll be here.”
After the tailgate, Counts and his wife, Alison, who was a member of the Oklahoma Delta Delta Delta sorority, joined the throngs in Sooners colors of crimson and cream making their way to the sold-out football stadium. The couple, both of whom are avid photographers, had all-access passes, which let them capture the action from the sidelines. They planned to give their photos to the Athletic Department as well as hang them in their offices. Alison Counts pointed out the billboard for Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores, which was bright yellow with a red heart. Billionaires Tom and Judy Love, who built a single gas station into a chain of 380 convenience stores in forty states, spent millions as primary sponsors, alongside Coca-Cola and AT&T. Their grandchildren belonged to the SAE chapter. “They were none too happy when their two kids were kicked out of the house,” Alison told me. At that moment, it became especially clear to me just how powerfully SAE had transgressed. University presidents are often cowed by the power of the fraternities; yet Boren had seen the video and shut down the chapter almost immediately.
In the Counts’s luxury box, high above the fifty-yard line, family and guests, many SAE alumni, dined on shrimp cocktails and barbecue while watching the Sooners obliterate Iowa State, 52–16. In the front row, Jack Counts III sat next to Lindsay Strunk, a nineteen-year-old sophomore and member of the sorority Pi Beta Phi. Strunk told me about their first date aboard the infamous bus. The younger Counts had apologized to her, and the moment had passed quickly. They had recently enjoyed spending time together at a Halloween party thrown by former SAE members. Dates tried to match each others’ costumes. Counts, with his shock of curly blond hair, and Strunk, with her long, straight blonde hair, already looked like a matched set. But they played along. Counts wore a bear suit and Strunk a gold dress and a sash that read “Honey.” Parkhurst, who was also in the luxury box, had his arm around Corina Hernandez, the Mexican American former beauty queen and sorority sister from Oklahoma State. Their first date on the bus had also blossomed into a long-term relationship. Hernandez told me that online commenters had been calling for the expulsion of the women on the bus, too. At the time, she worried her name would get out. “When it happened, I was just dumbfounded,” she said. “I felt there wasn’t time to do anything. I also remember all those white faces. I’m thinking, ‘I’m the only person who isn’t white.’”
Colleges purport to encourage interactions across the silos of class, race, and ethnicity; here, a fraternity thwarted its own members’ natural inclination to learn from other students. Hernandez made Parkhurst more sensitive to the perils of bigotry. Parkhurst told me he had planned to bring up the song in the next chapter meeting. I imagined how SAE’s Oklahoma chapter could have gone in another direction. It could have promoted its members’ tolerance and respect. Instead, it brought out the worst in them.
IN DOWNTOWN OKLAHOMA City, the Elemental Café offers “micro-lot” beans from farms in Ethiopia and Costa Rica and “single-origin” cocoa powder. From its floor-to-ceiling windows, you can see the Oklahoma City federal courthouse, site of one of the nation’s worst terrorist attacks, inspired in part by the Turner Diaries, a book revered by white supremacists. This juxtaposition of multiculturalism and racism seemed like a fitting place to meet the last African American member to have joined the University of Oklahoma chapter of SAE.
William Bruce James II, who graduated in 2005 and was now a lawyer, grew up in Ada, Oklahoma, population 17,000, where his father was a senior vice president of a bank. A National Merit Scholar at a math and science magnet school, he had considered historically black Howard University and Dartmouth but chose Oklahoma because he was offered a full scholarship and it was close to home. When he enrolled in 2001, James wanted to join Omega Psi, a historically black fraternity whose members included the poet Langston Hughes and civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson. His mother told him to steer clear because she worried about hazing.
James felt comfortable joining a historically white fraternity. His earliest memories had been of his role in integrating white environments. He was the first African American boy in his preschool; his sister, the first African American girl. He checked out the various houses at the University of Oklahoma. Some held no appeal. To him, they seemed “cookie cutter,” populated with preppies in pastel shorts or Wall Street types with slicked-back hair. James visited SAE with a white childhood friend whose grandfather had been a member. He liked that they weren’t selling a “hedonistic fantasy,” though he did lose his way in the enormous house and stumbled on a pool table and big-screen TV. He noticed one Native American member and another from Venezuela. He liked the variety and joined the fraternity. James loved Greek life at Oklahoma. He became a “new-member educator” and “song chair” and also led homecoming rallies. During freshman year, James met the person he would end up marrying: a young white woman from the Delta Gamma sorority. They had been in a play together and fell in love. After college, his SAE friendships continued. Five of the groomsmen at his wedding were fraternity brothers. When his son was a year old, James took him to the Oklahoma SAE house and showed him his picture hanging on a wall. James dreamed of his son joining one day. Then, the morning after the chant on the bus, his wife, a therapist, showed him the video.
“I was shocked,” James told me over a cup of herbal tea. “It was something that never should have happened. I felt like I had accomplished something at the fraternity. I thought of all the conversations I had with my pledge brothers. The whole idea of we’ll trust each other because we’re brothers. We’ve taken a giant fall.”
James appeared on television amid the uproar over the video with another SAE member named Jonathan Davis, who had joined the chapter in 1999 and been its first black member. Heartbroken and angry, both men nevertheless came to the defense of their housemother, who had been vilified on social media for another video that came out just as the chapter was shutting down. Beauton Gilbow, a seventy-nine-year-old white woman who grew up in Arkansas, was known as Mom B. She was much beloved by members who remembered how she taught them manners and helped decorate the house with her own antique furniture. A newspaper unearthed a 2013 video that gave life to the scandal. In it, Gilbow, white haired with bright-pink lipstick, sang along with the lyrics from a rap song by Trinidad James and gleefully repeated the “N-word.” “I wouldn’t even hesitate for a split second to say Mom B. is undoubtedly not a racist,” Davis, a medical-sales representative in Colorado, told CNN at the time. “I see her being caught up in the moment. She does like to mix it up socially, and likes to have fun with the guys and their dates that they bring over to the house.” James recalled how much Gilbow cared for him and his family, and how she displayed pictures of him, his wife, and their family in the fraternity house entryway. “Mom B. means a lot to me,” he said. He called to tell her, “Hey, don’t ever use that word again, even in a song. But from me, you’re forgiven.”
Fifty SAE brothers called and e-mailed James, asking if he was OK. He also received what he called “random” Facebook friend requests from SAEs across the country. He wondered if the senders, worried about being considered racists, wanted to prove they had a black friend. The national office invited him to teach at the leadership school, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He still has close friends from SAE, but something changed after the video. At some point—he doesn’t remember when—he and his fraternity brothers stopped offering each other the secret handshake with the interlocking pinkie fingers. He may have stopped. Or maybe they did. Out of respect, he thought. “I feel like a part of my past has been destroyed,” he said, “the part where I was an SAE.”
James remembered some powerful moments as the chapter’s only black member. Some were uncomfortable. At times, brothers would call him the “token.” “Sometimes, I let it go,” he said. “Sometimes, I said, ‘That’s not a cool thing to say.’” James felt like his presence made a difference. A white member from a small town in Oklahoma confided in him about his own father, who had referred to someone as “a colored guy at the store.” “It felt dirty to him,” James said, suggesting a shift in his brother’s consciousness. Once, members considered throwing a party with the theme “forty ounces of frat.” They and their dates would dress up as rappers and their entourages. They would dance to hip-hop and drink malt liquor—hence, the title. In other words, it would be a classic “ghetto party,” the kind that so often ends with a fraternity lambasted online and in news articles. James saw the problem right away. Gently, he suggested it could come across as racist. “Let’s not do that,” one of the organizers said. Imagine if someone had said those simple words when the racist song made its way from the leadership school to the University of Oklahoma.
JAMES’S ACCOUNT REMINDED me of the words of Ben Johnson, another African American SAE member. At the 2015 convention, Johnson addressed members about the racial history of SAE. A 1987 graduate of the University of California at Irvine, he was president of SAE’s alumni association. He also chaired a national diversity committee, and he urged the gathering to reckon with its racial history, not ignore it. “SAE was founded in 1856 at the University of Alabama,” he said. “It was a bad place, a bad time. SAE must respect its history, understand its history, but not be a part of it.”
Other institutions of higher education are starting to account for their roles. More than a dozen universities, including Harvard and Brown, have taken steps to acknowledge their ties to slavery. Colleges are erecting memorials, renaming buildings, and sponsoring research. Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, said it would offer admissions preferences to the descendants of 272 slaves it sold in 1838 to shore up its finances.
After the Oklahoma incident, rather than reassess its past, SAE removed references to its Southern roots from its website. I decided to delve into SAE’s archives to understand what had happened generations ago, at the dawn of the era of integration. I found an extraordinary account of an SAE convention in 1951. It had long been a carefully guarded secret, and it helped explain the roots of the fraternity’s racial hostility and why it is something of a miracle SAE ended up with any black members at all.