University of Alabama Greek system remains segregated

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2001 by Joiner, Lottie

Melody Twilley could be considered a typical student. The Camden, Ala., native from an upper-middle-income family attended a prestigious math and science high school. Now in college, she is an A-student with a 3.87 grade point average and sings first soprano in the campus choir.

Like many other young American women, Willey wanted to join a sorority when she got to college. The talented and academically gifted student seemed to be the perfect candidate for a sorority, an asset to any group.

But Willey attends the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where for the second year in a row, she was rejected by all 15 of the schools historically white sororities. She says there is only one reason.

"I think I was rejected both times because I am African American," says the I8-year-old junior.

The University of Alabama has made tremendous progress in integration since 1963, when staunch segregationist governor George C. Wallace made his famous "stand in the schoolhouse door" to block the enrollment of two Black students. But despite the university's strides in diversifying its student body, its Greek system remains racially segregated.

Segregated Greek-letter organizations have recently raised concerns at other Southern universities as well. At Auburn University, 15 members of the Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi fraternities were suspended from school (and the university no longer recognizes the two fraternities) after photographs of students at a Halloween party masquerading in blackface and Ku Klux Klan robes surfaced. One student in blackface had a noose around his neck, and other members wore shirts emblazoned with the Greek letters Omega Psi Phi, a traditionally Black fraternity.

Similarly, members of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity at the University of Louisville in Kentucky also dressed in blackface on Halloween. The school's disciplinary review panel suspended some of the fraternity's priveleges.

In yet another incident, Halloween photographs appeared at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, in which two members of the white fraternity Alpha Tau Omega wore racially offensive costumes. One member was in blackface and a straw hat pretending to pick cotton, while the other student posed as a police officer holding a gun to the student's head. Both students were expelled from the group.

In August, the University of Alabama's Faculty Senate passed a resolution calling for white fraternities and sororities to accept Black members or risk penalties. Faculty Senate President Norm Baldwin says the resolution attempts to break down institutional barriers - the legacy system, recommendations and blackballing-that have kept Blacks out of the white Greek system. "We are concerned with the structures, policies and practices," Baldwin says.

Last year, Christina Houston, a biracial female, pledged an all-white sorority at the University of Alabama, and became the first African American at the school to break the Greek system's color barrier. But at the time the history-making event went unnoticed.

Baldwin says if progress isn't made toward integration, the university will penalize the groups, with sanctions ranging from restrictions on parties, to more severe penalties, including suspension from campus.

Two professors at the university, however, want to rid the university of the Greek system altogether. History professor David Beito and anthropology professor Charles Nuckolls says that the Greek system should be privatized and wrote a resolution calling for the end of university subsidies to the groups that discriminate on the basis of class, family background and race.

While the faculty senate is considering the privatization proposal, Baldwin wants to see the pledging system overcome its institutional barriers and integrate. Twilley, however, doesn't believe that either solution will help integrate the Greek system.

"If they are forced to do it, they're not going to like it," Twilley says. "It's going to be something the Greek system does on its own."

- Lottie Joiner