He put on a suit and flew to Indiana, told he would meet a man at the airport carrying a placard with his name.
He was a standout high school football player in Newport, R.I., when he received a recruitment letter from the SAE chapter. And I found it.”īack in 1973, Lee was the first African American initiated into his SAE chapter at Franklin College in Indiana. “I think joining SAE was one of the best decisions I have made while at this university. “These are all guys I’ve admired - leaders on campus,” he said. Six of the 10 members are from SAE, he said. This semester, Veasley helped found a diversity committee among the university’s 10 fraternities. “I see it as an achievement just to be part of this small group of select men,” he said. It’s just recent history when blacks were expected to be second-class citizens.”Įrnest Veasley, a sophomore engineering student at the University of Cincinnati, knows he’s among just three African Americans of the SAE chapter’s 130 brothers.īut he doesn’t feel like any minority. senator from South Carolina, was a lifelong segregationist and he just died in, in my lifetime. “We’re only a generation removed from real segregation in America, from all that terrible stuff. “I study history and I’ve read a lot about race relations in our country,” Sykes said.
So what should be the fate of the brothers at the University of Oklahoma? They shouldn’t be expelled just for their racist views, he said. The one requirement is that they have to be good guys.” “Our chapter recruits good guys, that’s it. “Everybody is upset about this,” he said. He says that while his school is on spring break, he has heard from his brothers via social media. But we get along.”Ī Mississippi native, the 20-year-old Sykes has a double major in social science and history and one day wants to be a teacher and education administrator. “We’re a small university in the Mississippi Delt,a and we don’t get a lot of diversity here. His chapter has 42 members, three of them black. “I was just elected chapter president this spring and, obviously, race has never been a factor for us here,” Sykes said. Mikal Sykes is president of his SAE chapter at Delta State University in Mississippi, said he’s never been made to feel out of place or socially uncomfortable. McDuffie, who left USC during his sophomore year to become a missionary, recalls partying with his fellow fraternity members, calling them a “band of brothers.” Racial bigotry and racism itself wasn’t an issue among us. “So some wondered, ‘If this person is coming in, do they have an agenda?’” McDuffie said. Their fears were political, he said, citing the 1968 Olympics’ Black Power salute, when two African American athletes raised their black-gloved fists in the sky during the medal ceremony. McDuffie, then 19, described a bit of “initial fear” among some of his fraternity brothers, but insists it wasn’t based on racism. Timothy McDuffie remembers joining USC’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter in 1969. “This fraternity has made me who I am today.” “To call our group racist is just extremely ridiculous,” said Otubu, who wants to attend law school. Never, he said, has he heard of any racist behavior.
He says he has attended leadership councils for the fraternity and has black friends in other chapters. Otubu, whose twin brother, Kevin, is also an SAE member, said the chapter’s 50 brothers include about a dozen African Americans, as well as a contingent of Asians, Latinos and Indian Americans. “I just cannot imagine my former brothers in Oklahoma - and I did call them brothers - making a chant like that, considering how diverse this organization is as a whole.” “It was distasteful, obviously,” said Colin Otubu, 20, president of the SAE chapter at Kent State University in Ohio.
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