“Who Does Not Make the Poor Man Conscious of His Poverty… or Any Man of His Inferiority”
Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s mansion at the University of Alabama looks more like a Southern plantation house than a frat. Two gilded lions, their heads resting languidly on giant paws, flank an entrance framed by towering white Corinthian columns. SAE’s oldest chapter holds a privileged place among the Neoclassical buildings that form the grandest fraternity row in America. In the taxonomy of Greek life in Alabama, SAE is “Old Row.” These organizations, which have the longest histories on campus, dominate the social food chain. Some “New Row” chapters may have bigger and more modern houses, but they don’t have the prestige, the deepest ties to tradition and power. Like other Old Row fraternities, SAE selects many of its members from the state’s most prominent and blue-blooded families, whose sons have presided over the South since the nineteenth century.
I came here to meet one of those sons, Benjamin Carter Goodwyn, the twenty-one-year-old president of the Alabama SAE chapter. The Goodwyns can trace their lineage to John Tyler, a Virginian and states’-rights advocate who became the tenth US president in 1841. On a warm October afternoon in 2015, Carter Goodwyn waited for me on the front steps in shorts and sandals and a backpack by his side. With his mop of red hair and light stubble on his chin, he hardly looked like the leader, or “Eminent Archon,” of one of the most powerful organizations on campus. But Goodwyn had every reason to feel at home. Both his great-grandfather and grandfather served as chapter presidents. His father, the chapter’s house manager, met his mother, an Alpha Gamma sorority girl, on Old Row. Her father and grandfather also belonged to SAE. Goodwyn has three SAE uncles, too. In the fraternity world, Carter Goodwyn qualifies as aristocracy—he is the ultimate fraternity “legacy,” or child of an alumnus, with a diamond-shaped Eminent Archon badge carved with the initials of his ancestors. As he settled into an oversized leather couch in the chapter-house living room, he told me, “I’m big on family tradition.”
Goodwyn showed me a weathered fraternity album and pointed to the generations of relatives who paved the path before him. Here was George Thomas Goodwyn, Carter’s grandfather, who teamed up with a pledge brother in 1947 to found one of the Southeast’s largest engineering and architecture firms. Both civil engineers, they built hotels, hospitals, schools, dormitories, and sports centers from Selma to Charleston to Oklahoma City. He flipped the page, and there was Carter’s father, George Thomas Jr. He also went into business with a pledge brother. Together, they formed the Goodwyn Building Company, which develops residential subdivisions of affordable homes with names such as Cotton Lakes. Goodwyn, who is earning a joint engineering-MBA degree, stood ready to take his place among those builders. In every way, Goodwyn’s family, friends, and business relationships are so tightly intertwined with SAE’s first chapter that they form a kind of rope extended from one generation to the next.
These family connections open doors on Old Row. Like football coaches scouting for prospects, fraternities start recruiting in high school. Chapters have feeder schools, and alumni lobby for their children long before less privileged freshmen figure out the best route to the dining hall. The most likely candidates come from affluent enclaves in Birmingham, Mobile, and Montgomery.
SAE has long favored Goodwyn’s private school, Montgomery Academy, founded in 1959 by white families fleeing public schools after the US Supreme Court mandated desegregation in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Seven percent of the students at the onetime “segregation academy” were now black, 15 percent members of minority groups, but its hometown still revels in its traditional ways. Each spring at the Montgomery Country Club, the Southern Debutante Cotillion introduces sorority sisters wearing white ball gowns and long white gloves. Goodwyn escorted his girlfriend, an Alabama Tri-Delt, or member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority.
Of course, not all SAE members are legacies, or even from Alabama. Still, it helps to have a connection. Goodwyn introduced me to Holden Naff, a twenty-year-old junior who was expected to succeed him as president. Naff graduated from Birmingham’s Mountain Brook High, a public school that is also a feeder into Old Row. Naff, who planned to go to medical school, wasn’t an SAE legacy. His father belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon at Tulane University, and his grandfather was also a DKE at Alabama. But his father’s boss, a prominent Birmingham money manager, was a member of SAE at Alabama. It also helped that Naff played competitive golf in high school. “Where I’m from, where you go is centered on the fraternities,” Naff told me. “A lot of golfers come to this house from Birmingham.”
With the right calling card, membership confers social entrée, especially to mixers that are called “swaps” at Alabama. Swaps offer up hundreds of sorority women, selected in no small part because of their attractiveness to fraternity men. (A former Alpha Omicron Pi sister told me her sorority rated prospects’ looks from one, which meant too unattractive to join, to four, “drop-dead gorgeous” and a shoo-in.) SAE holds its swaps at an annex called the Band Room. At 10:00 p.m. on a Thursday night that fall, the men had transformed the cavernous space into a nightclub pounding with pop music. Young women in short dresses and stilettos arrived in SUVs so packed that some of them tumbled out of tailgates before heading to the party. SAE’s signature event is the “Stockholders Ball,” one of the hottest tickets on campus. The extravaganza costs $20,000, and brothers must pay a “special assessment” of $250 apiece. During a week each spring, hundreds of people attend parties Thursday through Saturday, when the event culminates in a black-tie gala flowing with champagne and featuring an ice sculpture shaped like an SAE lion.
Old Row offers the amenities of a private men’s club, yet its dues and room-and-board fees can be competitive with the $13,000 estimated cost of living on campus with a meal plan. It helps that the university subsidizes fraternities. SAE’s house sits on public land, and the fraternity has a $1-a-year, 150-year lease. The chapter employs a staff of seven, including cooks and housekeepers, all supervised by Cindy Patton, the “house mom.” She is an ardent booster of Alabama Crimson Tide football: she wore crimson earrings that are replicas of its elephant mascot, crimson nail polish, and a crimson belt and ballet flats. A cook known as “Miss Angie” prepares such Southern favorites as macaroni and cheese, collard greens, corn bread, fried chicken, and catfish. For “guy” time, the men retired to a poolroom featuring a big-screen television that might not look out of place in a multiplex.
Beyond all the perks, the top fraternities wield power. The Old Row Greek organizations formed a secretive voting bloc, Theta Nu Epsilon, a kind of uber-fraternity known universally as the “Machine.” This cabal traced its birth to 1870, when Theta Nu Epsilon broke away from Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society. It spread nationwide before it reportedly died out except in Alabama, where it has dominated student government for generations, and SAE is a charter member. When I asked Goodwyn the name of the fraternity’s Machine representative, he laughed and looked away. “I don’t know,” he said, then added, “The Machine doesn’t exist.” Goodwyn’s response was not surprising. It is said that members are fined for acknowledging the Machine’s existence.
Those with the Machine’s backing nearly always win the student-government presidency. In the last six years alone, two members of SAE, Hamilton Bloom and R. B. Walker, won the presidency. Like Goodwyn, both were graduates of Montgomery Academy. Bloom, son of one of Alabama’s top lobbyists, was known on campus for his seersucker suits, bow ties, and impressive collection of fashionable socks. He now works in Washington for Richard Shelby, the powerful Republican senator from Alabama. Shelby is said to have been a Machine president as a Delta Chi at Alabama in the 1950s. Walker, a former lobbyist for Alabama Power Company, became director of government relations for the University of Alabama system. Goodwyn, who was a student-government senator, drew inspiration from their success. “I’ve gotten the kind of leadership experience that I can’t get anywhere else,” he told me. “SAE is a good stepping-stone if you want to go into politics.”
Secrecy heightens SAE’s appeal and power. When I visited, members had sequestered themselves in their chapter room to learn about fraternity rituals. As a nonmember, of course, I couldn’t attend that meeting, but later I took a tour of one of SAE’s most sacred spaces. DeVotie Memorial Hall is named after founder Noble Leslie DeVotie and was decorated in SAE colors of purple and gold. Gold chandeliers hung from the high ceiling and deep purple drapes framed the floor-to-ceiling windows, while purple candles in gold sconces gave the room an air of luxury. One wall displayed a fraying brown manuscript, the original chapter minutes from 1856. Nearby, gold-framed portraits of DeVotie and seven other severe-looking founders seemed to look down disapprovingly at the ease and informality of a younger generation. One founder, the bearded John Barratt Rudulph, wore a double-breasted Confederate uniform. Outside this shrine, the rest of the house gave you the eerie feeling of being watched. In room after room on the main floor, the photos of hundreds of young men in coats and ties hung on the walls. In the 1930s, the brothers wore their hair slicked back like matinee idols. In the 1970s, a few sported long hair and striped blazers with wide lapels and ties. In more recent years, short, neat hair and jackets with cleaner lines evoked a timeless preppie style.
The unspoken truth of this world was clear. This was a white fraternity. One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, sixty-four years after SAE dropped the discrimination clause from its laws, seven years after the election of the first African American president of the United States, the founding chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon had never had a black member.
On that late afternoon, one African American man made his way through the halls. In SAE’s lexicon, he was known as the “butler,” but he was really a custodian. He mopped the hardwood floors, then buffed them until they gleamed so brightly he could see his own reflection.
SAE’s FOUNDING CHAPTER reflects the social barriers that keep minority and low-income students out of historically white fraternities. Their recruiting practices, opaque and favoring insiders and legacies, all but guarantee a candidate pool dominated by white students. Even if a black student were welcomed into an old-line fraternity house as a candidate, he would have trouble seeing himself inside walls covered with portraits of white students and Confederate soldiers. The flare-ups of overtly racist episodes, such as the Oklahoma video, have further discouraged minorities from joining. For lower-income students, both white and minority, the cost can be prohibitive; an environment of assumed affluence—of $250 “special assessments” for a party—has repelled students from modest backgrounds. An Alabama political science professor described this system, with its unspoken rules and assumptions, as textbook “institutional racism,” the kind that may not always be intentional but can be just as hard to overcome.
These barriers reveal themselves most clearly in the South. At the time I visited Alabama, I was told its SAE house was among several Southern chapters without black members. Like Oklahoma, the region includes some of the largest SAE chapters in the country, and their recruitment focused on legacies. Clark Brown, an SAE member who graduated from the University of Arkansas in 2007, told me nearly all his fraternity brothers were legacies who had secured spots when they were in high school. Others had to stand out in some way. Brown wasn’t a legacy, but he was a member of the varsity tennis team and a Chancellor scholar, an honor for entering freshmen. At the same time, African American and other minority fraternities pushed hard—and early—for members. “By the time rush comes along, they’ve already picked the smartest, most accomplished, most athletic guys,” said Brown, now general counsel for SAE at its headquarters. “There aren’t many left who you’d want to join your fraternity. The stars would have to align perfectly for an African American to join the Arkansas chapter.”
After the Oklahoma video became public, SAE hired Ashlee Canty, its first director of diversity and inclusion, who planned to visit campuses such as the University of Mississippi to encourage them to welcome minority students. Canty is African American and, amid the controversy about SAE, at first resisted taking the job. Her friends questioned her judgment. “I didn’t know if this was a public relations move or a legitimate position that will have some clout in the fraternity,” she told me. She came to view the fraternity as committed and sincere. She also had an abiding belief in the virtue of Greek life. As an undergraduate at North Carolina State University, she joined the historically African American Zeta Phi Beta sorority, as had her mother before her, and worked as a graduate assistant in the Department of Fraternity and Sorority Life. Growing up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, she never considered joining a historically white fraternity because her mother’s sorority experience inspired her.
Canty considered the racial divisions of Greek life a matter of self-selection. “At the core of it, SAE is a historically white fraternity,” she said. “They are always going to be majority white. People want to join with people they connect with—and the first thing they connect with is ‘people who look like me.’” Canty said fraternity chapters reflect a college’s culture as much as the national organization’s. SAE leaders said they won’t institute the kind of admissions policies that universities rely on to increase diversity, namely, racial preferences. Fraternity leaders criticize that approach as amounting to “quotas.” Although controversial, such “affirmative action” plans have repeatedly been upheld by the US Supreme Court as serving a compelling national interest. I asked her if she would track each chapter’s racial composition to encourage less diverse houses to reach out to minorities. “I don’t want it to get to the point of counting brown faces,” she replied.
When black students choose African American fraternities, they often lose out on the amenities and career networks taken for granted at historically white organizations. This inequality extends well beyond the South. For a study published in 2012, the sociologists Rashawn Ray and Jason Rosow spent nine months observing and interviewing fifty-two members of historically white and black fraternities at Indiana University. Even in the Midwest, they found unfairness reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. White students held private parties in their palatial chapters. Black fraternities had no houses, and African American men were excluded from parties at historically white fraternities because they were open only to members or recruits. Class played an explicit role, too. Men in white fraternities placed socioeconomic barriers to admission. One of the top chapters asked for parents’ income on its membership application. Members cultivated an aura of privilege, bragging of their chapters’ wealth and influence. As one member said, “There are kids in our house worth $400 million.”
In 2015, the Indiana University Faculty Senate, which had been troubled by such divisions, received a rare glimpse of Greek demography. The professors asked the Student Affairs Division to poll its chapters. Through a public-records request, I obtained a summary. On a campus where 20 percent of US students were members of minority groups, several big chapters reported a minority membership of less than 5 percent. Others, including SAE, were more diverse. One-sixth of SAE’s roughly 110 members were minorities. The university didn’t collect data about subgroups of minorities. Andrew Cowie, SAE’s Indiana University president, told me the chapter had three black members. Cowie said his house took pride in its diversity and marched with an African American fraternity after the Oklahoma video surfaced. Steve Veldkamp, the university’s director of student life and learning, said the survey’s results surprised him because all fraternities of any significant size had minority membership. “There was more than tokenism,” Veldkamp said. “This isn’t 1950. We’re headed in the right direction.”
Veldkamp, like many administrators who oversee Greek life, is a true believer in fraternities and sororities. From his office at the Indiana University Student Union, he also directs the Center for Fraternity and Sorority Research, a nonprofit funded in part by Greek organizations. Veldkamp, tall and lean with a neatly trimmed beard flecked with gray, comes from a white, working-class background. He grew up in Flint, Michigan, and his father worked construction and drove trucks. As a first-generation college student at Grand Valley State University, he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, which he credits with teaching him leadership and social skills. “It was the ideal fraternity experience,” he told me. Still, others on campus hardly see fraternities as a haven for the working class. In contributing to the school’s strategic plan, a group of thirty-three Indiana students, faculty, and alumni issued a 2016 report that found, for all its philanthropy and leadership, Greek life contributed to an “elitist social hierarchy” that is “replicated in recruitment and social opportunities.”
Campus geography reinforces the inferior circumstances of non-white students in Greek life. Indiana University’s main fraternity row sits on a ridge above the campus—a visual reminder of its privileged position. In the 1950s, the university gave fraternities and sororities twenty acres of prime real estate, land that then president Herman B. Wells, a member of Sigma Nu, called “admirably suited to give large houses a dignified setting.” The university also backed loans for financing new houses and for expansions and renovations that feature imposing stone entrances, Tudor-style gables, manicured hedges, and porches with swings.
A few blocks away on a fall afternoon, an Indiana University junior named Frank Bonner, the son of a middle-school math teacher, worked the front desk at a dorm to earn money to help pay for college. Bonner was president of Iota Phi Theta, an African American fraternity that has no chapter house. Like many black students who join African American fraternities, he was drawn to their legacy of providing a haven for students shunned by white Greek-letter organizations. Rather than Confederate soldiers, their alumni have included W. E. B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., who all belonged to Alpha Phi Alpha. “You have a history of black organizations advancing equality and social justice,” Bonner told me. Once, as a freshman, Bonner tried to go with friends to what he called the “mansion house” of a historically white fraternity. “We didn’t know anyone, so we couldn’t get in,” he said. He hadn’t been to a “mansion house” party since. Bonner, who was also president of the organization representing black fraternities and sororities, said his members aren’t pushing for houses of their own. It would be hard to pay for them; his fraternity charged an initiation fee of $700 and $125 in annual dues. Bonner said he would rather push for economic and academic help that would benefit all minority students, not just those in Greek organizations. “In the grand scheme of things, trying to cause an uproar to have a mansion house doesn’t make sense,” he said. “There are other battles.”
Greek organizations at Indiana and other big public universities may not have a formal fraternity “Machine” that dominates elections, but they still tend to exert a powerful influence on campus politics. At the University of Texas in 2013, fraternity and sorority members made up 15 percent of students but 45 percent of those elected to the Student Government Assembly. Suchi Sundaram, a columnist for the Daily Texan, the student newspaper, criticized the result of this imbalance: a succession of white fraternity men as presidents. “The Greeks have ultimately created a dynasty out of a democracy,” she wrote.
After college, these student-government positions burnish résumés and form networks propelling students into successful careers in politics and business. Lauren Rivera, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, determined that bankers prefer fraternity heads to candidates with better grades. “People like people who are like themselves,” Rivera, who interviewed 120 professionals involved in hiring graduates for banking, law, and consulting jobs, told Bloomberg News. A 2001 study of seniors at Dartmouth found that those who networked with fraternity and sorority members and alumni were more likely to get higher-paying jobs, especially in investment banking or Wall Street sales or trading. In 2013, Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta fraternity received an e-mail from an alumnus working at a unit of Wells Fargo and Company, the largest US mortgage lender. Its San Francisco office had hired Alpha Deltas for four straight years. If they mailed résumés to a fraternity brother, the e-mail said, it would go to the top of the pile. That year, Conor Hails, the twenty-year-old head of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sigma Chi chapter, recalled exchanging a secret handshake with an executive at a recruiting reception for banking giant Barclays PLC. “We exchanged a grip, and he said, ‘Every Sigma Chi gets a business card.’” Hails recalled in the same Bloomberg article, “We’re trying to create Sigma Chi on Wall Street, a little fraternity on Wall Street.”
AT THE UNIVERSITY of Alabama, the administration explicitly embraces two conflicting goals: promoting diversity and Greek life. To attract out-of-state students, including top scholars, the college has been distancing itself from its racial past. In 1963, a few blocks from the university’s fraternity row, Governor George Wallace made the “stand in the schoolhouse door,” his infamous failed effort to keep black students out of the college. When I visited, African Americans made up 12 percent of undergraduates, less than half the percentage in the state, though similar to the US average. In 2016, President Stuart Bell called “an accepting and inclusive community that attracts and supports a diverse faculty, staff and student body” one of four pillars of a new strategic plan. At the same time, Alabama takes pride in holding “the coveted honor of being the largest fraternity and sorority community in the country.” More than 11,000 students, or 36 percent of undergraduates, belong to Greek organizations. The school endorses—and financially backs—a system that benefits rich, white students and largely excludes blacks. Over the last decade, in a kind of Greek arms race, fraternities and sororities have spent more than $200 million to build or expand thirty mansions, each one larger and grander than the last. The university has leased its own public land for as little as $1 a year. To finance the houses, the college sells bonds, which let Greek organizations borrow more cheaply because the public is assuming the financial risk of default. Chapter members and alumni, who pay off the debt, then own the mansions, which have cost as much as $13 million for a single building.
This public support of a racially divided Greek system has long infuriated campus critics, including the editors of the Crimson White, the student paper. In the 1990s, Pat Hermann, a white English professor, accused the school of subsidizing segregation. “I am very, very tired of apologists for apartheid,” he said. In 2011, amid renewed calls for integration, then president Robert E. Witt drew a rebuke from the Crimson White for words that seemed a defense of segregation: “It is appropriate that all our sororities and fraternities—traditionally African American, traditionally white and multicultural—determine their membership,” said Witt, who became chancellor of the University of Alabama system.
In 2013, public outcry finally sparked change. That year, undergraduate sorority members wanted to offer bids to two accomplished African American students, including the step-granddaughter of a University of Alabama trustee. Their alumni advisers blocked their admission. In previous years, black women tended to be eliminated in the early rounds of deliberations. That year, they progressed further, sparking intense debate, according to Yardena Wolf, then a member of the historically white Alpha Omicron Pi. “Girls were saying there would be so much media coverage, and boys won’t swap with us anymore,” Wolf told me. “I thought, ‘What the hell? This is 2013.’” Students from outside Alabama no longer took racial attitudes for granted. Wolf was Jewish and, though she was born in Tuscaloosa, grew up in Oregon. Pressure mounted. The Crimson White ran a story about the black women’s rejection. Wolf and other white sorority women marched in protest. Their efforts provoked a national media firestorm. Breaking with the past, Judy Bonner, the university’s first female president, insisted that the sororities integrate. By fall 2015, most of the historically white sororities included from one to three black members. It was hardly representative of the campus, considering some chapters had more than four hundred members, but it was progress.
Out of the media spotlight, however, fraternities remained stubbornly segregated. Kathleen Cramer, who retired in 2012 as senior associate vice president for student affairs after thirty-six years at the university, said sororities changed because undergraduate women pushed for diversity. “The same thing would have to come from the fraternities,” she told me. “It’s definitely been slower to happen.” In the fall of 2015, twenty-five of thirty-one historically white fraternities—including all the Old Row chapters—had no black members, according to internal university documents I obtained. Along with SAE, they included some of the largest chapters on campus, such as Delta Kappa Epsilon, Sigma Nu, Kappa Alpha, and Phi Gamma Delta, each of which had more than 120 members. “Even in the age of Obama, it may be easier for a black man to sit in the White House than in a University of Alabama fraternity house,” wrote Lawrence Ross in a 2015 book on race at American college campuses. In 2016, without fanfare, Phi Gamma Delta, an Old Row stalwart, became one of six additional fraternities initiating black members, doubling the number from the year before, a faculty senate report found. In an e-mail, Monica Greppin Watts, a university spokeswoman, pointed out that the school now requires non-discrimination clauses in student-group constitutions, as well as diversity training. She noted that, in 2016, three African-American women became presidents of traditionally white sororities.
Despite these changes, newcomers often viewed Alabama’s social life as straight out of the 1950s. “I was horrified when I came here,” said Amanda Bennett, an African American senior who grew up in Atlanta. “It’s completely segregated.” Longtime observers saw progress, though halting and slow. Norman Baldwin, a University of Alabama political science professor, blamed institutional roadblocks more than overt racism. Baldwin, who is white, had been fighting Greek segregation for fifteen years. In his classes, he surveyed racial attitudes and documented increasing tolerance. For example, in 2012, three-fourths of students said they would marry a person of another race, up from one-half in 1999. Baldwin, who co-chaired a faculty committee on diversity, said any reform must include a requirement that the Machine emerge from the shadows. In his view, the officers should be made public, so it can be held accountable for practices that limit opportunities for minorities. “We now have what I call institutional barriers,” Baldwin said. “We have institutional racism.”
Most of all, in Baldwin’s view, fraternities must change their recruiting. As a first step, he recommended shifting to the approach long favored by Alabama’s traditionally white sororities. It was known as formal recruitment and was conducted as follows. In August, sororities all held a week of scheduled events before making their bids. This increases the chance that a newcomer would consider joining. It also made it obvious when all the black women received no bids, or offers of membership. By contrast, the historically white fraternities used “informal” recruitment. By and large, they selected members and extended bids in the spring and summer before classes even began. This practice disadvantaged outsiders, especially black students. In addition, white and minority fraternities held separate recruitment drives, which encouraged racial sorting. Baldwin proposed instituting a unified recruitment program. In that way, black students would be more likely to consider historically white Greek groups, and vice versa. The university has adopted many recommendations from Baldwin and other members of its faculty senate: the school outlawed “social boycotts” of campus organizations that accept black students; ordered the tracking of the racial and ethnic composition of fraternities and sororities; required new house construction to include plans to promote diversity; and ordered Greek organizations to “neutralize the effects of legacy preference” on minority recruits.
I WITNESSED THE conflict between the school’s racial history and its desire for progress when I visited the University of Alabama’s Ferguson Student Center. After a recent $45 million renovation, it had all the amenities of a twenty-first-century hub of campus life: a food court with Wendy’s and Subway, a theater, and a space for “sustainable service and volunteerism.” The gleaming campus hub acknowledges, in a small way, the school’s racial history. Visitors encounter a portrait of a bespectacled Birmingham school teacher named Autherine Lucy. In the 1950s, Lucy fought a three-year court battle to become the first African American to enroll at the University of Alabama. Because of mob violence, she lasted only three days as a graduate student. The school expelled her “for her own safety.” Only in 1988 did the university’s board overturn her expulsion, and she finally received her master’s degree four years later. Lucy’s story represents the sluggishness of change at Alabama.
Most students here know about Lucy, but few could tell you much about the center’s namesake, Hill Ferguson. At the dawn of the twentieth century, he was a Big Man on Campus, a fraternity brother at Sigma Nu, a Phi Beta Kappa, and quarterback of the football team. Ferguson was a Birmingham insurance executive who served for forty years on the Board of Trustees before stepping down in 1959. He has been described as “Alabama’s most loyal alumnus.” He was also a die-hard segregationist. As a trustee, he fought against Lucy’s enrollment, going so far as to hire a private investigator to dig up dirt on her and another black student. In the words of the Southern historian E. Culpepper Clark, Ferguson “never gave up his quest to ‘keep ’Bama White.’” The university makes no mention of a head-spinning irony: Lucy’s portrait hung in a student center that honored a fraternity man who fought to keep her off the campus.
On the Ferguson Center’s second floor, I met Elliot Spillers, president of the Student Government Association. He left his office and headed for lunch at the food court. In his plaid shirt and khakis, Spillers had the easygoing charm of a natural politician. He also inherited a sense of discipline and government service from his family. He was a US Air Force brat who had lived in Turkey and Germany and all over the United States before settling in Alabama. Both his parents were officers: his father, a lieutenant colonel and congressional liaison to the Pentagon; his mother, a nurse who had advanced to major. When we spoke, his younger brother, a high school junior, was considering playing football at the US Naval Academy. Spillers envisioned his next step as a Fulbright scholarship abroad, law school, and work in the State Department. He would seem a natural choice as student body president, but he wasn’t, because he was black. In 2015, Spillers became the first African American student-government president in almost forty years. “What drew me was the opportunity to make a difference,” Spillers told me. “I wanted a challenge.”
That challenge required Spillers to confront the most powerful force in Alabama student life, the Greek establishment’s Machine. Not coincidentally, his achievement represented twin firsts. He was the first African American to become president in four decades, as well as the first candidate to win without Machine backing since the mid-1980s. Even his triumph highlighted the barriers posed by Greek life.
In 1976, when a black student named Cleo Thomas matched his achievement and won the presidency, men in white sheets burned crosses. Spillers was aware of this history and figured his candidacy would be a struggle. He didn’t belong to a fraternity but knew he had to court the Greek community. He had support from Alpha Tau Omega, a New Row fraternity with four black members in the fall of 2015. The fraternity hung an Elliot Spillers banner across the front of its house. One night, it was mysteriously removed, an act of vandalism many on campus attributed to the Machine, which has long been known for electioneering and dirty tricks. Even though the Machine opposed him, Spillers had plenty of friends in Greek life. He was part of a historic power couple. His girlfriend, Halle Lindsay, was one of the African American women who integrated Alpha Gamma Delta, an Old Row sorority. He attended fraternity and sorority parties and referred to members as “my Greek friends.”
I pointed out that the Student Government Association and the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life face each other across a hall, as if they were two branches of a bicameral government. “The location is no accident,” Spillers said. “Alabama isn’t subtle. Student government is Greek life, and Greek life is student government.”
Spillers gave plenty of credit to the sorority women who stood up to alumni who wanted to continue excluding African Americans. He also praised then president Bonner, who risked the wrath of donors by forcing integration. “She was so brave,” Spillers said. “I respect her completely.” Spillers said the current administration needed to focus more on Old Row fraternities. “It’s one of those conversations everyone wants to have but no one wants to have,” Spillers said. That afternoon, Spillers was headed to a conference where he was pushing for what he hoped would be a signature achievement of his tenure: a full-time administrator to promote diversity. Spillers would like to see houses for minority fraternities. More broadly, he said, the university should promote social life for independent students. “Where is our money to have a party?” he asked. It will require a wholesale rethinking of campus life. “I’m afraid when I leave, it’s going to go back to the way it was,” he said. “I’m looking for a more sustainable solution.”
Five months after our conversation, the crosscurrents of change and resistance swept the campus. Lillian Roth, a sophomore political science major, won the presidency as Spiller’s successor. The founder of her own jewelry business and a former intern for Martha Roby, a Republican Alabama congresswoman, she joined only a handful of other female Student Government Association presidents in the University of Alabama’s history. In other ways, she still symbolized the old order. She was white and a sorority sister at Chi Omega, part of the Machine, which had swept back into power. Like the two former student-government presidents from SAE, she was a graduate of Montgomery Academy. Roth was also a debutante and the daughter of an Alabama Chi Omega. Her father, Toby, had been president of the Theta Chi fraternity at Alabama and later worked as the chief of staff for Bob Riley, the Republican Alabama governor. After her victory, Roth declined to answer a student newspaper reporter’s question about the Machine.
FAR FROM PUBLIC view, Old Row fraternities had been taking the first steps toward integration. The year before my visit, Jackson Britton, president of Kappa Alpha Order’s chapter, privately pushed to admit a black member. He had been discussing integration with Yardena Wolf, one of the students who had fought to open up sororities. The two belonged to a prestigious campus institute that focused on ethical leadership. Although Britton was politically conservative and Wolf was liberal, they had become friends. Britton’s father, who was in Kappa Alpha Order, was a first-generation college student and a descendant of Southern sharecroppers. Britton sympathized with those who found themselves living on the margins. He asked KA members if they would consider circumventing the pledge process entirely and extending a bid to a black student. “No one was opposed,” Britton told me. “Members were enthusiastic about the idea.” Britton then suggested an African American junior who was friends with almost everyone in his pledge class. The student, whose name he declined to share, had top grades and a record of community service. “Everyone agreed we needed to give him a bid,” Britton said. In a decision that was never made public, KA made the offer. Five minutes later, the junior called back. He declined. He told Britton he couldn’t afford the cost of more than $7,000 a year in dues. Wolf, who ended up quitting her sorority, said she was disappointed in her friend. “It was frustrating,” she said. “I thought he would do more than he did.”
To Britton, the episode illustrated why the entire recruitment system had to change. He described the informal fraternity rush as “governed by a set of unspoken rules” that assured a white membership. The chapter receives about two hundred recommendation letters from alumni, typically legacies, for a pledge class of forty. The fraternity throws three informal rush parties on campus for graduating high school seniors and two more in the summer. Those who live nearby, legacies, and wealthier students are far more likely to attend. The result is predictable. KA skews heavily in-state, drawing many of its members from the small towns that have always been its lifeblood. “If you were to ask people who KA attracts, they would say, small-town Alabama guys, the good old boys,” he said. Later, as speaker of the student Senate, Britton co-authored a resolution supporting a “formal” rush open to all students.
Britton said KA had also been toning down its Southern pride. Established in 1865 at what is now Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, the Kappa Alpha Order calls Confederate general Robert E. Lee its “spiritual founder.” KA is known for its signature “Old South” parties where men dress in Confederate uniforms and women in hoop skirts. In 2009, Kappa Alpha had apologized after it paused its “Old South” parade in front of a historically black sorority. A year later, the national organization said members should no longer wear Confederate uniforms because they were “trappings and symbols” that could be “misinterpreted or considered objectionable to the general public.” In Alabama, members started wearing gray clothing and caps, so it wasn’t clear how much had really changed. Britton said the fraternity then eliminated gray clothing, as well as the “Old South” name for its end-of-the-year party. I asked Britton how many black students would want to join KA as long as it continues to honor Robert E. Lee. Britton replied that KA’s reverence for Lee could be divorced from his support for slavery. KA members say they try to live by Lee’s definition of a True Gentleman, which is much like SAE’s. “The manner in which an individual enjoys certain advantages over others is a test of a true gentlemen,” Lee wrote in papers found after his death in 1870. “The Southern values we embrace are really Lee’s definition of a true gentleman,” Britton said.
At the SAE house, I asked Goodwyn, the chapter president and fourth-generation SAE, why his house had no black members. He considered it a matter of self-selection. Goodwyn said one African American friend picked Alpha Phi Alpha, the historically black organization to which Martin Luther King belonged. “No one is keeping anyone out,” Goodwyn said. “People are going to go where they want to go.” Still, in his view, the social scene was starting to open up. After my visit, SAE had scheduled a joint philanthropy event to fight pediatric cancer. For the first time, rather than having separate events, this one included white, black, and other minority Greek-letter organizations.
Goodwyn and Benton Hughes, SAE’s rush chairman, said they had courted a black student named Justin Woolfolk in 2014. Like Goodwyn and Hughes, Woolfolk attended Montgomery Academy, where he was a tailback on the football team. “He would have been the first black SAE,” Goodwyn told me. Later, Woolfolk told me he understood the historic nature of joining the chapter. At Montgomery Academy, one of his teachers, an Alabama graduate, pulled him into his office and told him, “You know what a big deal it is.” Woolfolk said he felt welcome when he spent time in the SAE house during his rush visit in high school. “I wasn’t treated like a token black person,” he said. “They embraced me like I was anyone else.” Woolfolk ended up going to Birmingham Southern College instead because he could continue to play football. Without changing recruitment practices, Goodwyn’s approach—looking at only a handful of black students from fraternity feeder schools—guarantees any progress will be slow. Still, Goodwyn predicted that one day the chapter will accept a black member. “It will definitely happen,” he said. “It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of who and when.”