“Who Speaks with Frankness but Always with Sincerity and Sympathy”
On a September night in 1951, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon convention in Chicago radiated exclusivity. At the Edgewater Beach Hotel, a famed resort on Lake Michigan that attracted celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Nat King Cole, SAE members and their guests danced. They swayed to the Latin rhythms of bandleader Xavier Cugat and the voice of the singer Abbe Lane, known for her sultry Spanish ballads. The men of SAE may have enjoyed their cosmopolitan, multiethnic entertainment, but they had no interest in opening up their fraternity to that kind of diversity. They agreed with US senator Richard B. Russell Jr., one of the most powerful men in Washington, who was about to become their honorary president. Russell, a politician from Georgia, was a defender of segregation.
Behind the convention’s closed doors, fraternity members were struggling to preserve their exclusionary membership rules. Fraternity leaders debated a section of SAE’s governing laws dating to the early 1900s:
Any male member of the Aryan race, of good moral character and intellectual ability, who is a student at the domicile of the Chapter Collegiate, is eligible to membership in the Fraternity, except that (1) No person, either of whose parents is a full-blooded Jew, is eligible, and (2) No person who is or has been a member of another college social fraternity is eligible.
The “Aryan race” requirement, not to mention the exclusion of the children of “full-blooded” Jews, sounded as if it had come straight out of Hitler’s Germany. After the liberation of Nazi death camps, such attitudes were becoming less acceptable. The US government was beginning to fight discrimination, and public universities started pressuring fraternities to drop racist membership rules. The University of Connecticut threatened to shut down its thriving SAE chapter. The University of Rhode Island and the University of Massachusetts were expected to be next, as would colleges throughout the North.
On the last full day of the convention, more than 170 men gathered in a hotel ballroom. More than once, Emmett B. Moore, SAE’s president, asked the brothers to ensure no outsiders were present. Unlike all the other business of the convention, no transcript of this “executive session” would be published, not even, as was the custom, in the Phi Alpha, itself a secret publication of the fraternity. One member suggested barring the stenographer. Showing a lawyer’s regard for preserving the record, Alfred Nippert, an Ohio judge, disagreed. Nippert, who grew up in Germany during the nineteenth-century Franco-Prussian War, also had a keen sense of history. During World War I, he had acted as an emissary between the German leader Kaiser Wilhelm and President Woodrow Wilson. Now, Nippert took the floor to press his point, saying that they owed an accounting of their actions to the next generations. “We ought to know why and how we did it, when our sons and grandsons come to be members of SAE,” he told the crowd, his faint German accent giving him a sense of worldly authority. Nippert had authority for another reason. The lead financier of the fraternity’s headquarters, he was married to the heir of the Proctor & Gamble soap fortune. Nippert prevailed. Others remained worried that word of their deliberations would leak out. “For God’s sake, be careful, because this may be reproduced some day in every paper in the United States,” one member warned.
To save the Northern chapters, a panel of prominent members had already determined before the convention that SAE had no choice but to change the language of its laws. The group included a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, William W. Paddock, who gained notoriety in 1934 when the Boston papers said his institution processed part of the ransom money for the kidnapped Lindbergh baby. Other members inhabited the upper reaches of law, sports, and medicine: Samuel G. DeSimone, a state judge in New Jersey; Walter “Doc” Meanwell, a legendary former basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and M. Brittain Moore Jr., who became director of venereal disease research at what would become the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he published research on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, infamous for failing to treat hundreds of black men who had the disease.
The SAE leaders had concocted a recommendation that seemed straightforward: instead of insisting on an Aryan brotherhood, the fraternity’s law would allow as members all men “of sound moral character, of creditable intellectual attainments, and socially acceptable throughout the fraternity.” The SAE elders weren’t actually opening up the fraternity to blacks and Jews—far from it. They promised the convention crowd that the new language amounted to a public-relations move, a shift from explicit to unspoken discrimination. “We are all united on one thing, I am very sure, and that is that we cannot have certain people in the fraternity,” proclaimed Albert M. Austin, a past SAE national president. “We just can’t do it. We won’t do it, and, if that happens, if any of you walk out, boys, I’ll be number one.”
Austin lived in New York City, where he was a distinguished patent lawyer whose firm worked on a pivotal case involving Henry Ford’s intellectual rights to the automobile. But he told the audience he was “a Southerner by instinct.” He had grown up in Franklin, Tennessee, vacationed in the mountains of North Carolina, and spoke the language of SAE’s conservatives: “No power on Earth can keep us from selecting our friends. In Soviet Russia, they can’t make a man select his friends.” Sounding like a Southern demagogue, he gave a stem-winder: “Get rid of these words, but stick to our standards, stick to our standards, boys, until death do us part.” The crowd gave Austin a standing ovation.
Austin’s speech failed to convince traditionalists, who continued to fight in favor of the racist and anti-Semitic language. In their view, words mattered, and a change could open the door to black and Jewish members. Joseph Walt, a member of the University of Tennessee chapter, said his alumni were “unalterably opposed” to striking the discriminatory clause. Speaking of the admission of blacks and Jews, he said that his alumni “must be absolutely guaranteed that no such thing can or ever will take place.” G. Holmes Braddock, a member from the University of Miami, predicted the controversy would blow over as it had two years earlier at his alma mater when Jewish students briefly protested their exclusion. “We had a member of our faculty who was a Jew, and we had a fight on our hands,” he said. Braddock urged the fraternity to resist outside pressure: “I don’t want to see SAE deteriorate, and neither do I want to see us back down when the fight is just beginning.” Nevertheless, 122 members, more than the two-thirds majority required to pass the altered language, supported striking the discriminatory language. The word “Aryan” was out. Under the letter of the law, a member need only be “socially acceptable throughout the fraternity,” though it would still be understood what that really meant: no blacks or Jews.
But that gentlemen’s agreement failed to satisfy some members, who proposed merely shifting the discriminatory language from SAE’s publicly disclosed laws into the words of its secret ritual. They considered the ritual sacred because it had been passed down from Noble Leslie DeVotie, their founder. Pledges wearing robes and holding candles chanted its words in dark rooms. On the last day of the convention, Walt, who headed the ritual committee, suggested the private words of the ritual specify that only “white Christian Gentiles” could join SAE. The federal government might not abide discrimination in its public laws, but why couldn’t the offending language be included in the ritual? One speaker suggested the discriminatory phrase be written in Greek, so legislators wouldn’t understand it. Meanwell, the Wisconsin basketball coach loved the idea. “We would certainly put something in the ritual that we could stand on and know that we would have no persons of other color or of another race except pure white-blooded Americans, or red-blooded Americans,” he said. John Graves of the George Washington University chapter added, “We have to take something back to our brothers that is ironclad, something with teeth in it. We have to be able to say, ‘Brothers, here is what we did; we have all the safeguards in the world to keep the non-Aryan, the Negro and the Jew out of our fraternity.’”
Armistead I. Selden Jr., an Alabama state legislator who had been a World War II US Navy lieutenant, put forth a compromise. He focused on the words in the public law that had already been approved: members must be “socially acceptable throughout the fraternity.” Selden offered what he thought was a clever solution. What if the convention secretly defined the meaning of “socially acceptable”? What if members proclaimed it to mean, in fact, “white Christian Gentile”? To the Reverend Charles E. McAllister, dean of St. John the Evangelist in Spokane, Washington, the group was playing with words. McAllister was a member of the Washington State College of Regents and the convention’s keynote speaker. However, instead of arguing the fine points of his position, he used his time to tell a racist joke about “an old Negro Mammy… way down South” who called her child Morphy, short for Morphine. When asked why she had named her child after a narcotic, she replied that she had looked up the word in the dictionary: “Well, Mister, it said there that morphine was the product of the wild poppy and if ever a child had a wild poppy, this is the child.” The joke may have had little relevance to the matter at hand, but the audience laughed all the same.
As their 3:00 p.m. checkout time approached, the men were forced to make a decision. They turned to one of their luminaries, Eminent Supreme Recorder John O. Moseley, the fraternity’s executive director, who spoke up for the first time. No one had more standing than Moseley, except perhaps the late Levere. Moseley, courtly and bespectacled, was a Rhodes scholar and classics professor who became president of the University of Nevada. Perhaps most important, Moseley first introduced the True Gentleman creed as a cornerstone of SAE education. (In 1899, John Walter Wayland, a historian at what is now James Madison University in Virginia, wrote its words to win a contest at the Baltimore Sun for the best definition of a “true gentleman.”)
Moseley, born in Mississippi, was very much a Southerner of the old school. At the 1945 SAE convention, Moseley gave a keynote speech filled with racial overtones. He told Uncle Remus stories in a stereotypical black accent. He called Levere, the temperance activist and SAE historian, “a Northern boy who adored the South and loved to tell of the chivalry of our Southern SAEs in that War between the States.” He made casual use of racial epithets, saying apropos of nothing: “Like the nigger said, ‘He should have zigged when he zagged.’”
At the 1951 convention, Moseley backed Selden’s approach. Moseley assured the crowd that SAE would keep its door shut to the wrong people. “I was born and raised in the state of Mississippi and if anybody brings someone contrary to my social standards into this fraternity, Albert Austin said he would be the first to leave, and I’ll be the second,” Moseley said. He called for a voice vote on Selden’s compromise: that they would agree that day that “socially acceptable,” in fact, meant “white Christian Gentile.” In other words, SAE could tell college administrators it had changed its rules and ended discrimination, even though it hadn’t. It was an appealing strategy, although perhaps difficult to square with the creed of the True Gentleman, “who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy.” The motion carried.
The True Gentlemen had voted in favor of a lie.
TO CREATE AN American elite, the fraternity movement had long practiced discrimination, while its members praised it and its official literature codified it. Fraternity men liked the other definition of discriminating: a cultured person with refined taste, a discriminating gentleman. “Who made it a bad word, anyhow?” David A. Embury, chairman of the National Interfraternity Conference asked at a 1947 meeting. “I love the discriminating tongue, the discriminating eye, the discriminating ear, and above all the discriminating mind and the discriminating soul.” Or, as Coach Meanwell told members at SAE’s Chicago convention four years later, “You are chosen because of your traits, because of the manly traits you possess. Let’s face it. We do discriminate.”
The SAE men defending prejudice were some of the most respected leaders in the history of the fraternity and are still held up as models for members. Moseley founded SAE’s leadership school in 1935. The University of Oklahoma students had learned the racist chant from other members attending the John O. Moseley Leadership School. Moseley had deep ties to Oklahoma. He had joined SAE when he was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma; undergraduates later named the chapter after him. Walt, the Tennessee undergraduate pushing to add discriminatory language to the secret ritual, became a fraternity historian. For half a century, from 1959 through 2008, Walt edited the Phoenix, the manual given to all new members that outlined SAE’s values and history. He died in 2013, but his words still appear in the foreword of the edition handed out to undergraduates: “The basic principles that drive Sigma Alpha Epsilon are the same today as they were more than 155 years ago.”
Other members wielded influence in American society. Selden, who first suggested the compromise that created the unwritten rule that only “white Christian Gentiles could be members,” later became an Alabama congressman, an assistant secretary of defense, and an ambassador in the Nixon administration. Braddock, the alumnus from Miami opposed to Jewish membership, served on the Miami-Dade School Board from 1962 to 2000. There, in an instance of historical irony, he led the effort to desegregate Miami’s public schools. One school is named in his honor. “The world was different then,” Braddock, who was now ninety-one years old, told me. “I was born and raised a Southerner. As all Southerners did in those days, I grew up in segregation. I didn’t know any better.”
SAE’s Southern roots influenced its racial attitudes. When Noble Leslie DeVotie and his seven friends christened the fraternity by candlelight at the University of Alabama in March 1856, they shared prevailing Southern views. DeVotie’s own family had roots in both North and South. His father, James H. DeVotie, was born in upstate New York and was a descendant of French Protestants who arrived in the New World before the Revolutionary War. But the elder DeVotie, a severe, rugged-looking man with an unruly white beard, had become a diehard Alabamian. As a teenager, he was born again as a Southern Baptist, a denomination that advocated for slavery. James DeVotie became a preacher, then married into a prominent Montgomery, Alabama, family. Not surprisingly, his son, SAE’s founder, held similar views. Over the next three years, the younger DeVotie and his minions founded SAE chapters on other campuses. Staunch believers in slavery and the second-class status of black people, they chose not to venture above the Mason-Dixon line, instead opening chapters at ten Southern schools, including the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia.
For the Southerners of SAE, a black person’s smallest missteps could provoke violence. In 1857, a student at the University of Nashville’s Western Military Institute beat a black waiter whom he believed had offended him. The college demanded the student apologize to the waiter or be expelled. “To the young white men of the South, the demand was one they deemed unacceptable,” wrote William Levere, the SAE historian. Henry Halbert, an SAE member from Mississippi, petitioned the administration in favor of the white student, who had been expelled. The school demanded an apology from Halbert, too. He refused and was also kicked out. Halbert then transferred to Union University, a Southern Baptist institution whose president had no quarrel with Halbert’s behavior. There, he helped found an SAE chapter, the second in Tennessee.
Of the 369 men then initiated into SAE, nearly all fought for the Confederacy. One founder, DeVotie’s closest friend, John Barratt Rudulph, lost his arm to General Sherman’s forces in the Battle of New Hope Church in Georgia. Of the seven founders who were alive when the war began, six enlisted. Three of the enlisted men died, including DeVotie, who fell off the dock in Mobile, Alabama, at age twenty-three, hit his head, and was swept to sea. In all, seventy SAE members died in battle. Only one chapter survived, at what is now George Washington University. SAE later expanded into the North, starting with an outpost in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the South’s bloody Civil War defeat. The northern expansion sparked furious debate within the fraternity. Finally, one of its most successful leaders won the Southerners over by couching it as a quasi-military campaign to conquer “the best colleges and universities of the great North, East and West.”
In the early years of the movement, fraternities had no need for explicitly discriminatory policies because only a relative handful of Jewish and black students attended college, and it would have been unimaginable to consider admitting them. Even Catholics weren’t welcome. In response, these outsiders began to form their own organizations. In 1895, three Yale students founded nonsectarian Pi Lambda Phi, which became a haven for Jews. In 1899, students at Brown created the first Catholic fraternity. The first black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, followed in 1906 at Cornell, where Asian Americans established Rho Psi ten years later. The Latino fraternity, Phi Iota Alpha, founded in 1931, can trace its roots to 1898 and the formation of the Union Hispano Americana at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Members of these groups look with pride on their traditions, and many make an affirmative choice to belong. Yet they are creations of discrimination, of historically white Greek organizations seeking to preserve one of their core values: separation by race, religion, and ethnicity.
In 1900, Levere revealed what might happen when a student tried to cross these strict boundaries. He wrote a novel set at his alma mater, Northwestern University. In the book, a penniless “Persian boy” tries to join a fraternity and no one will choose him. “That dago has been rushing the frats so hard it’s a pity he cannot be accommodated and given a first-class initiation,” one fraternity man says in the novel. The brothers make up a fake fraternity called Alpha Sigma Sigma, whose initials stand for “ass.” On a dark, rainy night, they pick the outsider up in a carriage, blindfold him, and take him off campus for a mock initiation. There, he is beaten, forced to drink a mixture of milk and vinegar, stripped to his underwear, poked with sharp sticks, plastered with flypaper, and baptized with molasses. Finally, members deposit him in front of the Northwestern president’s house, where he would be picked up by the police. Levere presented the episode as all in good fun.
In the nineteenth century, SAE’s attitudes reflected many of the prevailing prejudices of the times. But certainly by the early twentieth century, Greek organizations displayed less tolerance than other elite groups. Ivy League schools, eager to attract the brightest students, began accepting immigrants, especially Jews, and, with the exception of Princeton, a small number of blacks. To be sure, these new members faced discrimination on campus and sparked a backlash. According to the sociologist Jerome Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton changed their admissions requirements to limit the number of students considered “socially undesirable,” namely, Jews from Eastern Europe. Rather than base decisions on academic performance, where Jews excelled, admissions officers turned to the subjective criteria of “character,” “manliness,” and “leadership.” These were the same characteristics prized by the historically white fraternities. The Ivy League, like Greek-letter groups, deemed that Jews lacked these qualities. In this context, elite college admissions officers sounded much like the fraternity leaders at SAE’s fateful 1951 convention. Robert Nelson Corwin, chairman of Yale’s board of admissions, called Jews “an alien and unwashed element” that “graduates into the world as naked of all the attributes of refinement and honor as when he was born into it.” Under the more subjective admissions standards, rich white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men received preference, and Jewish enrollment was suppressed by quotas.
Still, bigoted Ivy League admissions officers accepted some Jews and blacks. Not so, fraternities. Consider the contrast between SAE and Princeton, often considered the most “Southern” member of the Ivy League. Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910, held racial views that were similar to the leaders of SAE. Wilson, a member of the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi chapter, grew up in the South and worked to keep blacks out of Princeton. As president of the United States, he oversaw the segregation of the federal workforce. Yet even Princeton admitted its first African American student in 1945, decades after other Ivy League schools and six years before the Chicago SAE convention reaffirmed the fraternity’s commitment to discrimination.
Before World War II, fraternities made no effort to conceal their admissions policies. In a 1936 Ohio State University catalog, dozens of Greek chapters were listed with descriptions and membership requirements, their racial and ethnic divisions multiplying to the point of absurdity. Like SAE, Delta Tau Delta and Phi Delta Theta were restricted to “the Aryan race.” Lambda Chi Alpha accepted “non-Semitic” students. Phi Delta Chi was open to “Protestant pharmacy and chemistry students” and Alpha Zeta to “Gentile agricultural students.” Alpha Rho Chi was looking for “white male students registered in the departments of architecture, architectural engineering or in professional courses in landscape architecture, interior decoration or sculpture.”
After World War II, politicians, colleges, and the public began questioning such restrictions. The 1947 movie Gentleman’s Agreement attacked the kind of anti-Semitism on display at the SAE convention. It won three Academy Awards, including best picture. That year, President Harry Truman, a former Missouri farmer who had been known to use racial epithets, began a campaign for civil rights. He formed a committee to fight discrimination and appointed a commission to study the state of higher education as 1 million veterans flooded campuses. This older, more diverse group no longer reflected a country-club vision of college life. The Truman commission called for a doubling of college enrollment to 4.6 million, by 1960. It decried racial and religious discrimination, particularly quotas restricting blacks and Jews. The commission viewed those policies as reminiscent of the Nazis and “one of the plainest inconsistencies with our national ideal.” Truman, by executive order, desegregated the military and prohibited discrimination in federal employment.
Truman’s actions alarmed fraternities. In 1946, L. G. Balfour, a Sigma Chi member from Kentucky who ran a business selling fraternity pins and rings, distributed a bulletin about the threat of integration. He called it an assault on democracy. In his view, it resulted from the jealousy of “the unadjusted and the frustrated.” The statement quoted an unnamed judge and fraternity supporter who questioned “the theory that all races and religions should associate and intermarry” and “the old outmoded Russian theory of Communism that all must be reduced to the social level of the lowest.” Fraternities at the universities of Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina incorporated racially tinged themes into their symbols and parties, according to the historian Anthony James. Confederate flags flew over chapter houses at the Kappa Alpha Order, Kappa Sigma, SAE, and Phi Delta Theta fraternities. Parties with minstrel shows and blackface proliferated. SAE at the University of Georgia chapter started holding a Magnolia Ball, where the “clock was turned back 100 years” to the days of “stately Southern gentlemen with long plantation coats and top hats.” From 1945 to 1963, the fraternity section of the University of Alabama yearbook had thirteen Confederate-themed photographs, James found. Entries featured captions such as “The South Shall Rise Again” or “The Klan in their afternoon formals.” In 1947, members of SAE at the University of Oklahoma performed in blackface at a Christmas party. When I was at the University of Oklahoma, I found a 1949–1950 SAE scrapbook that featured a photo from an “International Ball” showing “Walter K and his Southern girl.” Both wore blackface. Walter looked like a hobo, wearing a top hat and vest with no shirt. His date had bones in her short hair and a nostril ring.
Outside the South, colleges pressured fraternities to integrate, pitting Greek alumni against more open-minded students. In 1946, Amherst College in Massachusetts decided that no fraternity could operate on campus if it restricted membership based on race, religion, or ethnicity, as the historian Nicholas Syrett recounts. Two years later, the school’s Phi Kappa Psi chapter pledged a black freshman. Its national headquarters revoked the chapter’s charter. Phi Sigma Kappa took the same step when its Boston University chapter pledged an African American. The University of Connecticut, in 1949, and the State University of New York system, in 1953, both told fraternities they had to eliminate discriminatory practices. Many fraternities, like SAE, dropped discriminatory language while continuing to keep blacks and Jews out of their chapters.
During the civil-rights era, conflicts intensified between colleges and fraternities, as well as between students and alumni. In 1962, Williams College announced a ban on fraternities, saying they were interfering with its academic and social mission. After the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, fraternities faced pressure to desegregate or shut down. When national fraternities refused, some chapters broke away to form separate local organizations that could offer membership bids to any student. Sigma Chi’s Stanford University chapter won praise from the college when it sent two members on the dangerous “Freedom Summer” civil rights rides to Mississippi in 1964. The next year, Sigma Chi’s national headquarters suspended the organization when it pledged a black student. Still, some members of SAE played high-profile roles in defense of civil rights. Ivan Allen Jr., mayor of Atlanta for much of the 1960s, worked with Martin Luther King Jr. to fight segregation and testified in favor of President John F. Kennedy’s civil-rights legislation. Edward Breathitt Jr., the governor of Kentucky, then led the state to pass antidiscrimination laws considered stronger than those in Washington.
As higher education began to embrace diversity, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton dropped Jewish quotas and instituted affirmative-action programs to enroll blacks and other minorities. Fraternities headed in the other direction; rather than adopt the spirit of the civil-rights movement, they fought against it. Often, they relied on a particularly effective way to preserve the white brotherhood: the requirement of a unanimous, secret vote approving new members. Under the time-honored blackball system, brothers would pass around a box into which they would deposit balls that were typically the size of marbles. A white ball represented approval of a pledge and a black ball, rejection. A single, prejudiced member could “blackball” a Jewish or black pledge, no questions asked.
In 1966, Daniel Sheehan, a white student who was social chairman at SAE’s Harvard chapter, nominated as a member Tommy Davis, who was African American. “He was the first black man ever to receive a nomination for membership in SAE in the entire history of that old, traditional Southern fraternity,” Sheehan, who became a civil-rights lawyer, wrote in a 2013 book. Davis was blackballed. “I stood up and announced that I was going to blackball every single other nominee until whoever had thrown the black balls against Tommy Davis fessed up and gave us their reasons.” Sheehan blackballed the next ten nominees, until one member, from Cleveland, said he had heard Davis dated white women: “If he were to show up at one of our SAE social gatherings with a white date, why, I just don’t know what I would do.”
“He’s on the dean’s list. And he is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met at Harvard,” Sheehan recalled saying in reply. “And, besides, I understand that he presses twice his weight in the varsity weight room. So exactly what would you do if he came to one of our social functions with a white date?”
Sheehan said the room was silent, and he suggested the member could just leave the party if Davis showed up with a white date. The blackballing continued, until Sheehan said he wouldn’t approve any new brothers as long as he was a voting member of SAE. Davis won a bid. But when Sheehan explained how it had happened, Davis declined. “I knew he wanted to join our fraternity, but he wouldn’t under those circumstances,” Sheehan said.
SIGMA ALPHA EPSILON held its June 1969 convention in San Francisco, the capital of the counterculture. Yet the music the members danced to at the Palace Hotel, known for hosting presidents and debutantes in its luxurious Beaux Arts decor, wasn’t Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. Suggesting little had changed since the 1950s, members and their guests enjoyed the twelve-piece band of Ray Hackett, the music director for the 1960 Republican national convention. Once again, the business of the meeting was discrimination and how to preserve it. At least a dozen colleges had indicated they couldn’t allow chapters on their campuses whose national organizations required unanimous approval of every pledge because they understood how the blackballing system excluded African American members.
Steve Walker, a consultant to the national SAE office, had toured seventy-two chapters, from Florida State University (FSU) to the University of Maine. He had concluded that fraternities would be expelled from campus if they continued to require unanimous approval of pledges. SAE had faced a similar threat in 1951 because of the “Aryan” clause in its national laws. At the convention, conservative alumni wanted to stick with the tradition of the blackball. They argued that they had a constitutional right to choose members however they liked, federal law notwithstanding. Richard Generelly, a Washington lawyer, called abandoning the blackball a “suicidal experiment” and an “inexcusable surrender of the freedom of association guaranteed our fraternity under the First Amendment.” An internal SAE survey showed that undergraduates were split. About half favored preserving the blackball. Forty percent said a black brother would hurt their chapter, and more than half said they wouldn’t welcome a black student who was already an SAE member transferring from another campus.
Walker wanted to save SAE chapters in the North and West. Echoing his forerunners at the 1951 convention, he drew on his impeccable Southern credentials to convince the skeptical crowd. As an alumnus of the University of Alabama, he belonged to the “mother,” or first, chapter. Walker had established his conservative bona fides when he fought against Students for a Democratic Society, activists who opposed the Vietnam War, supported racial justice, and viewed fraternities as part of an unfair American social system. “I am certainly no left-wing radical,” Walker told members of the convention.
To win over fellow Southerners, Walker summoned the same argument that prevailed in 1951. He suggested a way to eliminate the language about the blackball without changing the practice itself. It would all hinge on the words at least. The national laws would require at least a majority vote, but chapters would have the authority to set a stricter standard, including a unanimous vote. The law would specify that “the election of pledges shall be the sole prerogative of the individual chapters.” Again, it was public relations and semantics. When a college president asked if SAE required a unanimous vote, the national office could say, truthfully, that it mandated merely a majority. The rest was up to students. Walker offered powerful evidence that the status quo would remain. He invoked the 1951 decision to eliminate the discriminatory clause, which he said had no effect on the fraternity’s membership practices. “There were many, many people throughout the fraternity… who threw (their) arms up in despair and said, ‘If we pass this law there is going to be a great influx of black members,’” Walker said. “I submit to you that simply hasn’t happened.”
The motion passed, and the next year an SAE field report showed that the lawyerly language had done its job. In April 1970, Thomas M. Rigdon, president of SAE’s University of Missouri chapter, described a fraternity in ascendance. He chronicled a string of victories: a successful rush; improving grades; a van for blood donations; a Christmas party for a school for the deaf; victories in football, golf, and swimming; eight men on the varsity basketball team; writers for the school newspaper; students in the campus branch of the US Army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps; and class officers. One piece of news would have especially interested alumni at the San Francisco convention. A black student had tried to join the chapter. Rigdon offered a window into the deliberations:
Thoughtful conflict arose over the bidding of a Negro during this rush week with the 100 percent rule being severely criticized by some. The Negro was not bid, and the 100 percent rule withstood. Emotions were stirred by both issues. During the heat of debate, I was touched by the deepest feeling felt in fraternity life as I observed young men debating complex issues in a tolerant, thoughtful manner. Everyone in the chapter gained from this experience.
The “100 percent rule”—namely, the blackball—had worked just as the convention had hoped it would. Still, Rigdon felt sure the times were changing: “I predict that within two or three years the 100 percent rule will fall, and, in the future, if a qualified man enters rush, no matter what his color, he will be pledged.”
Rigdon’s prediction proved optimistic, though even the unspoken prohibition on black and Jewish members gradually disappeared, in most chapters, over the next few decades. SAE doesn’t have records detailing the first members to break those barriers. Whereas Jews would rise to occupy even the highest levels of SAE national leadership, blacks faced tougher barriers, as well as conflicted emotions when they did gain acceptance.
W. Ahmad Salih, an African American who graduated from MIT in 1972, joined SAE, though only briefly. In a collection of oral histories of black MIT students, Salih said he knew of another black student, a senior, who also belonged to the fraternity. Salih grew up in Chicago, the child of poor, uneducated parents who had emigrated from the South. He chose the chapter because its members were known as serious students and athletes. But soon after he read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and a book on lynching, he changed his mind. “That book got me so upset at white people in general that I started losing weight,” he said. “I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t live in the fraternity anymore.” The robes and hoods in SAE’s initiation reminded him of the Ku Klux Klan. Even though he was already a brother, he decided to quit. “I mean we didn’t have a burning cross, but the image was painful,” said Salih, who became an emergency-room physician in California.
America’s racial history haunted these SAE members, white and black. Their recollections illustrated the tug-of-war between progress and resistance in the fraternity movement. To understand this dynamic more fully, I decided to travel to the University of Alabama, where SAE’s story began.