As a youngster, I used to listen to my mother tell me how she and her sister grew up in Ithaca, New York. She was always talking about how pretty it was and would go on and on about the Finger Lakes and the mountains. It always seemed weird to me since I grew up in the segregated south. I knew about New York City (I thought that Harlem was the same as New York back then) and Brooklyn because I had heard that a lot of Black folks lived there. Back then I figured that Black folks could not possibly live in places like that, living that close to white people and such. On top of that it was too cold. Coming from Richmond, Virginia this all seemed too strange for me. I could not really understand how Black folk could live that close to white people.

As my mother told me more, I learned that my grandfather, who died before I was born, won a scholarship to Cornell University back in the early 1900s. He stayed up there and married a beautiful woman whose family was one of the few Black families in town. That was why my mother, the older of two sisters, was born there in what I thought was a strange, far-away land. And though she is dead now, the romantic visions of this cold life in a small quaint college town remain imbued within me.

Her father faced many challenges as one of the very few Black students at Cornell during that time. Basically, all of the other Black students shared those challenges as well. I learned that he bonded with a number of them and decided to start a Greek Letter fraternity. It seems at that time there were no fraternities for Black students and assimilation into University life at Cornell was difficult. More than the weather up there was cold.

Anyway, my grandfather and six of his fellow students were successful in founding the first Greek Letter Fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha in 1906. Back then Cornell was daunting; though admitted to study, it was clear that students of color did not really belong or feel welcome in the community. At the same time Greek Letter Fraternities were a key survival system for white men. They provided social bonding and academic support for their members. Logically enough, Blacks could not join them back then. What my grandfather and his friends, now affectionately and reverently known as the founding Jewels of Alpha Phi Alpha, did must have been phenomenal. They were courageous enough to say that if we cannot join the fraternities that make you feel welcome and supported at Cornell, then we need to form our own. There had been an earlier effort to start a fraternity at Cornell for Black students that was unsuccessful, but my grandfather and his friends were committed enough to make their goal a reality regardless of the sacrifice.

Alpha Phi Alpha now has members worldwide and boasts in its membership so many accomplished Black men that it has truly set a proud tradition. There is so much good that can be said for the organization that this article certainly cannot do it justice. If any readers want to know more I would invite them to visit the Alpha Phi Alpha website, www.alphaphialpha.net.

In a twist of fate my grandfather seemed to have deeply influenced my fate when my opportunity to attend college came. Oddly enough, Virginia