Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  When the girls voted to cut the only black candidate who had braved rush, Ali, disgusted by her sisters’ bigotry, decided to leave the sorority—and the university. Upon learning of Ali’s reasons for leaving, the administration temporarily suspended the chapter until Alpha Gamma Delta agreed to promise that they would aim to be more tolerant of diversity. Ali, who transferred schools, has since heard from sorority sisters around the country who shared their own stories of sorority discrimination.

  From 2001 to 2003 at schools across the country, there were numerous instances of Greeks exhibiting blatant racism, from students staging fake lynchings and donning Klan costumes to sororities taking pictures of fraternities in blackface. To better understand the ways African American students deal with this kind of atmosphere, I set up a visit with Melody Twilley, a junior at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa.

  TALL, BRIGHT, PRETTY, AND OUTGOING, MELODY TWILLEY is leading me on a tour of the University of Alabama’s Sorority Row: two streets full of impressive Greek Revival houses framed by manicured lawns, meticulously pruned shrubbery, and flowers planted in each sorority’s colors. Rocking chairs and wrought-iron tables line columned porches straight from a southern grandmother’s dreams. The front of the Zeta house is festooned with a large banner proudly proclaiming, “Congrats! ZTA Gini Mollohan lavaliered to ΒΘΠ Jason Hudson.”

  Melody and I pass the Tri-Delt house. “Old money,” she says, gesturing to the fountain in front of the house, surrounded by brick mosaic and orange flowers, and featuring a sculpture of a cherub. On the sidewalk leading up to the house the Tri-Delt letters are inlaid in metal. We pass the Pi Phi house, where broad windows reflect long Ionic columns tied with yellow ribbons. “New money,” Melody points out. She sighs as we continue down Sorority Row. “Ah,” she mutters. “Skid Row.”

  On paper, Melody Twilley is, by anyone’s standards, prime sorority material. A graduate of the prestigious Alabama School of Math and Science, Melody won several awards and was chosen to speak at commencement. At the time that she rushed at the University of Alabama, she had a 3.87 GPA and sang first soprano in the campus choir. She was seventeen, having skipped two grades before arriving at college. Her father was known as the largest black landowner in the state.

  In the fall of 2000, Melody signed up for fall rush. One of the main reasons she had backed out of going to Rice University at the last minute was that they didn’t have sororities. At Alabama, by contrast, sororities practically controlled the student body. The University of Alabama, like many southern schools, runs a segregated rush process: white Greeks rush in the fall for the white organizations, while the black Greeks rush in the spring for the black organizations. Melody didn’t think anything of joining white rush; she was used to navigating a mostly white community from her time in high school. Many of the more ambitious Alabama students—and a fifth of the campus—join the UA Greek system, which is expected to match them with appropriate future spouses and provide an entree into a powerful state network. Residents who aren’t members of the UA Greek system, it has been said, rarely break into the state’s political and economic elite. But Melody wasn’t motivated by the promise of power and connections. She merely liked the idea of belonging to a sisterhood. It sounded like fun.

  So Melody, optimistic and excited, began the year as the only black girl to enter white rush. “I thought I was the greatest. Stupid me. I didn’t know they didn’t take black people,” she explains. The girls seemed nice and Melody looked forward to the social outlet a sorority could offer her. She was especially excited about the Thursday night “swaps,” or Greek theme parties—“Pimps and Hos,” “Saints and Angels”—in which pledges from sororities and fraternities were matched up. When seven of the sororities invited her back for the second round of rush, she was mildly disappointed that the other eight weren’t interested, but didn’t think anything more of it.

  Only a small group of women were rejected from all fifteen white sororities. Melody was one of them. Over the next year, faculty members and administrators rallied around Melody as a way to encourage the university to desegregate its Greek system and unify its rush process. In the fall of 2001, at the insistent prodding of students, faculty members, and sorority alumnae, Melody rushed again, this time with letters of recommendation from scores of sorority graduates and endorsements from university officials.

  “I was glad she was going back through,” says Kathleen Cramer, the university’s associate vice president for Student Affairs. Cramer, who had been the president of the Kappa Kappa Gamma house when she attended Alabama in the 1970s, gestures in her office with manicured nails and a crisp bob. “I was very optimistic the second time could work. I lined up recommendations, introduced her to alumnae, student, and Panhellenic leaders, and a faculty member and I had a talk with her about rush wardrobe and conversation. We thought we could help her.”

  Melody wasn’t completely willing to believe that she had been rejected the first time around because of her skin color. She still wanted to join a white sorority, and she thought there was a good chance they might take her in. By the third round of rush, only one sorority, Alpha Delta Pi, still had her on its list. Sparkling in an indigo gown, a rhinestone cross necklace and earring set, and smart patent-leather pumps, Melody walked into ADPi, the first house on the corner of Sorority Row. Inside, sisters and rushees were talking one-on-one, mostly about the latest football game. A sister sat Melody down. “There’s a rumor going around that you’re only going through rush just to prove a point,” said the ADPi sister.

  Melody was flabbergasted. “You’ve been through rush—why would anybody go through all of this twice just to prove a point?!” The sister seemed to understand. “I’m here to find sisterhood, fun, and good times, same as everyone else is,” Melody continued. “Don’t look at me as the black girl going through rush. Look at me as a girl going through rush.” They couldn’t do it. Once again, every white sorority on campus turned her down.

  When I speak about this with Kathleen Cramer, she shakes her head with resignation. “This is a system steeped in tradition, and I think that’s part of the problem. Chapters are afraid to go first. I think there’s an unarticulated pressure toward sameness, which fosters racism and a homogeneity they’ll never see the rest of their lives,” she says. In May 2002, Cramer and the Alabama faculty senate sent to each of the twenty-six historically white national sorority presidents a letter requesting help “eliminating barriers to recruitment of diverse members for fraternity and sorority chapters” by de-emphasizing the letter of recommendation requirement. Only Tri-Delt responded. (The Tri-Delt president thanked Cramer and said she would work on this issue.) “Most Nationals don’t want to talk about it,” Cramer tells me. “Nationals have other priorities. These are women who had a very different sorority experience and are struggling with change. They’re more worried about the media attention than they are about doing a progressive thing.”

  The University of Alabama remains the only Greek system in the country never to knowingly admit an African American. (One sister with a white mother and a black father came forward in 2001 to defend the Greeks, but because she looked like a white girl with a tan, her sorority hadn’t known—and she hadn’t confessed—her background.) This is a school where many of the alumni, who comprise the largest university alumni association in the world, opposed integration. This is a school where, in the late 1980s—when the campus chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the country’s oldest African American sorority, was about to move into what had until then been an all-white Sorority Row—two white students burned a cross on the front lawn of the new house.

  “We have one hundred percent illegal segregation here, and the president, vice president, and board of trustees lie about it,” says Pat Hermann, a professor at Alabama who has been fighting this issue for twenty years as the liaison to the faculty senate on Greek diversity and the chair of the Student Coalition Against Racism. When I meet with him in his out-of-the-way office on the E
nglish department floor, I don’t have to prompt him with any questions. He calmly leans forward, eyes flashing through his thin-framed glasses, pale fists clenched in the sleeves of his checked blazer. “There have been a dozen whites in the black system, but there have been and are zero blacks in traditional sororities. This is our third century of total segregation. The administrators would rather support racism and a one hundred percent apartheid policy than take any real steps, steps they claim to be taking.”

  He points to the current issue of the student daily newspaper, which ran an article about a vice president who had just announced her resignation. “She was one of the very worst vice presidents we ever had. She took no steps. This problem could have been solved in ten minutes, but there is an extreme reluctance to polarize the racist element,” he says. “The older Greek alumni are racist and the Panhellenic group here is hard-core racist. They want to make sure there is no desegregation under their watch. They are not going to allow a breaking of that line.”

  Hermann has been an explosive force on the segregation issue on a campus that he says hosts “the most powerful Greek system in America,” a system that the sororities control, while the fraternities are “appendages.” Hermann has been so vocal that the national office of a white sorority flew in a lawyer from Colorado to discuss cultural diversity with him. “She privately indicated that she supported me, but that her professional obligations required that she represent the other side of the argument.” The national president of the sorority, Hermann says, “was very hostile to me simply because we suggested integration. She reacted in a way that, I felt, showed lack of breeding and a cold-hearted commitment to her local chapter’s racist policies rather than a civilized, open-minded ‘liberal’ attitude toward the inevitable integration.”

  Hermann is disgusted with his university. “I’m pro-Greek, but hard-line racist sororities like all of ours should be disbanded. This is the only social group we allow to discriminate on the basis of race. It’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s imprudent,” he says. This is a school where, Hermann tells me, his tone incredulous, “one of the members of our board of trustees said, ‘We’re not going to turn our fraternities and sororities into places where just any nigger could get in.’”

  “I GUESS THERE WERE TOO MANY OTHERS SAYING,‘NO, you’re not letting that black girl in my sorority,’” Melody tells me now as we continue down Sorority Row. I silently wonder if Hermann ever told her what the trustee said.

  “But why would you try again when it seemed those girls didn’t want to be your sister?” I ask her.

  “That’s not what it was,” Melody says. “It wasn’t that the members didn’t want to be my sister. It was pressure from the alumnae saying, ‘I don’t want a black girl wearing my sorority letters.’”

  I give her a skeptical look.

  “For the most part I blamed the alumnae, after the second time,” she adds. “I can’t think that the girls, even after all the pressure, would still not want me. I’m sure it was hard for some of them to agree to turn me down. At least, I would like to think that.”

  An Alpha Omicron Pi sister who works at the library reference desk under Melody’s supervision calls out to Melody and crosses the street to greet her. The girls talk about upcoming Formals. “She’s a sweet girl,” Melody tells me as we walk away. “But we’re not allowed to talk about what happened. Rush is a forbidden topic with me. Sorority sisters always change the subject, even my good friends.”

  I ask her why she didn’t consider joining any of the black sororities on campus, one of which expressly told her she’d be welcome. With one exception, the black sororities are housed across campus, far from the venerated Sorority Row. “I didn’t know a whole lot about black sororities,” Melody says. “And I wouldn’t fit in at all. DST, AKA—they’d put me out in two days.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’d be like, ‘You’re really a white girl. You’re on the wrong row.’”

  We watch as, at about ten minutes to the hour, white girls come streaming out of the sorority houses with backpacks and sorority T-shirts, ponytails bouncing as they walk each other to class in small groups. Melody glances at one of the houses, then looks down. “Sometimes I wonder what could have been,” she says softly. “It’s hardest to see the girls who would have been in my pledge class. Life would have been so much easier if they had just let me in.”

  Chasms Between Black and White

  FROM THEIR INCEPTION, HISTORICALLY BLACK SORORITIES differed greatly from white sororities. Alpha Kappa Alpha began in 1908; Delta Sigma Theta split from AKA in 1913; and Zeta Phi Beta and Sigma Gamma Rho were founded in 1920 and 1922, respectively. One of the main purposes of these organizations, which emphasized service and scholarship far more than the white sororities did, was to improve the social status of African American women. According to the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC), the black sororities’ (and fraternities’) umbrella group, the sororities specifically grew out of “racial isolation” and “a need for African Americans to align themselves with other individuals sharing common goals and ideals.” The black Greek organizations subsequently “took on the personae of a haven and outlet, which could foster brotherhood and sisterhood in the pursuit to bring about social change through the development of social programs that would create positive change for Blacks and the country.”

  It wasn’t as though black aspiring sorority sisters had a choice. Until the 1960s, most white sororities were contractually obligated to their national organizations to refuse membership to nonwhites. White author Rita Mae Brown wrote, “My sorority sisters were horrified by my civil rights activities. I was dismissed via a little handwritten envelope in my mailbox, silver, gold and blue border, Delta colors.” But since 1963, when federal law prohibited Greek groups from discriminating based on race, black sororities have grown exponentially. Black Greek-letter organizations estimate that 75 percent of black leaders in business, government, science, and the arts are members of NPHC sororities or fraternities. Membership has included such popular women as Star Jones and Maya Angelou (Alpha Kappa Alpha), Aretha Franklin and Lena Horne (Delta Sigma Theta), Zora Neale Hurston (Zeta Phi Beta), and former congresswoman Gwendolyn Cherry (Sigma Gamma Rho). Patricia Roberts Harris, the first black woman to be appointed dean of the Howard University School of Law and the former secretary of housing and urban development, was the first executive director of Delta Sigma Theta. The night President Lyndon Johnson appointed her ambassador to Luxembourg in 1965, she said, “While there are many things in my life which have prepared me for what I am about to do, it is largely the experience of Delta Sigma Theta which gives me the most security.”

  Much of the success of black sororities can be attributed to their primary purpose. While white groups are largely college social organizations, black sorority sisters sign up for a lifelong pursuit of common service and cultural ideals. Unlike the white sororities, black sororities offer graduate and alumnae chapters that members are expected to join after college; prospective members need not even be undergraduates to join in the first place. According to the NPHC, graduate chapters expect each member to “attend regular chapter meetings, regional conferences and national conventions, and take an active part in matters concerning and affecting the community in which he or she lives.”

  At one of these conventions—the 2003 Alpha Kappa Alpha North Atlantic Regional Conference held at the Baltimore Convention Center—I attended the opening event, a public meeting. During that session, devoted to speeches from sorority officers and the presentation of “Spirit Awards” to Montgomery County, Maryland, Police Chief Charles Moose (who could not attend) and Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, I was surrounded by women swathed in salmon pink and apple green—the AKA colors—from their hats to their sneakers. From the start, I was struck by the main difference between this opening session and that of the white Greek Leadership Conference in Pittsburgh. Here there was no talk about boosting numbers to fulfill a q
uota, no side discussions about mandating specific types of clothing. Rather, the vast majority of this meeting was devoted to talking about community service. (There was also a short discussion of public service; Maryland State Senator Gloria Lawlah noted that of six African American senators on the Maryland floor, three of them were AKA women.) Speakers addressed the sorority’s efforts to improve health care and literacy and strengthen the family bond of African Americans. “Always giving back to the community,” said the sorority’s international president. “This is the foundation of the heart of Alpha Kappa Alpha.”

  This theme encapsulated one of many differences between white and black sororities. Sabrina and Melody, it turned out, had good reason to think that the black and white sororities were not interchangeable. These are not organizations that are born from the same beast; they embrace entirely different meanings of the idea of being pledged to a sisterhood. As Irene Padavic and Alexandra Berkowitz revealed in their aptly titled study “Getting a Man or Getting Ahead: A Comparison of White and Black Sororities,” all of the black sorority sisters they interviewed said that community service consumed the majority of their sorority time. By contrast, the white groups were focused on date events and romantic relationships—something that black sororities, which don’t have lavaliere and candlelight ceremonies, are not concerned with. Meanwhile, the researchers pointed out, the white sororities in their study had elaborate ceremonies to celebrate when sisters achieved various stages in their romantic relationships, but one white group’s award for the sister with the highest grade point average, unaccompanied by ceremony, was a bag of potato chips.