The Men of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity - Pride and History

The Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity started in 1906 with seven African American men, now called the "seven jewels," who were students at Cornell University. The now hundred-year old Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity began with the following founding fathers: Henry Arthur Callis, Charles Henry Chapman, Eugene Kinckle Jones, George Biddle Kelley, Nathaniel Allison Murray, Robert Harold Ogle, and Vertner Woodson Tandy.

These students found that people of color needed to support each other at Cornell University in 1906, and help fight racial injustices that were prevelent at that time. In 1905, there had been only six minority students enrolled at Cornell University; in 1906 none of them returned the following year as a result of racial injustice and inequalities. In 1906, knowing they would face many hardships and difficulties as they struggled to get a quality education during this harsh time of racial prejudices, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and legal discrimination, the seven new minority students banded together in 1906 to form a study group and support each other at the otherwise all-white school. This was the core groups that became Alpha Phi Alpha and founded the organization.

Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and many other influential African American leaders became members of Alpha Phi Alpha over the years, and these men later argued cases before the Supreme Court, became Supreme Court justices, and Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was the seminal civil rights leader in the 1960s. Thurgood Marshall was the primary counsel that argued before the United States Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that eliminated legal segregation in public schooling; within a few years he was nominated to the Supreme Court itself, the first African American men ever nominated to and placed on the court. Other members also stood at the forefront of equal rights movements, and wanted to change the way the world treated minority people, to change laws allowing discrimination, and to make a better world for all people of color. Civil rights leaders achieved great success in the 1950s and 1960s, and Alpha Phi Alpha helped to promote many of these men in terms of character and strength.

Alpha Phi Alpha's rich history, with their pledge to stop racial injustices, provided a foundation and a support center for these men and their movements that helped drive and inspire people to fight for equality. Members of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity should take great pride in the sacrifices that the great men before them made, and examine the struggles of members before them that brought Alpha Phi Alpha to its current prominence as a strong African American fraternity with a solid, achievement-based history and ongoing tradition of excellence and brotherhood.

Alpha Phi Alpha is and has always been devoted to academic excellence, good character, fellowship, humanity and helping to correct social injustices faced by minorities in the United States. Its beginnings at ivy league Cornell are testimony to the strength and intelligence of the founding fathers, and their legacy lives on.