Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. Iota
During the opening of the school year 1905-1906, there, on the campus of Cornell University were a group of students among the various colleges who were desirous of maintaining more intimate contacts with one another--more than what classroom study permitted. During the Fall of 1905, they often met in small groups and discussed possibilities of closer contacts among themselves.
As students in a large American University, they were cut off from many of the opportunities for mutual helpfulness which came to groups of students through personal contact and close association. As individuals, there were personal contacts of value with other members of the student body, but as a group, they were proscribed in their associations. The racial cleavage, characteristic of this period, had laid the basis for the division of the races even in college life. Many of these students were self-supporting, and their resources were limited and if membership in the university fraternal associations had been permissible, it is probably that advantage could not have been taken of the opportunity.
Confronted by the social proscriptions of race common to American institutions of this era, hampered by limited means with the attendant circumstances of the average "poor" student,, these students faced the future and boldly endeavored to find a way out of the difficulties, scarcely realizing, however, the import of their action on subsequent generations of college students.
The results of the efforts of the seven trailblazers--Jewels Henry Arthur Callis, Charles Henry Chapman, Eugene Kinckle Jones, George Biddle Kelley, Nathaniel Allison Murray, Robert Harold Ogle and Vertner Woodson Tandy, are noted in the extensive General Organization that we know today as Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.
These seven visionaries, had no encouragement from members who were eager to recognize them as "brothers". On the contrary, they were misunderstood and discounted by their fellow schoolmates who opposed fraternities as a whole, and were not able to see at this early period in Negro Collegiate education, any worth place for a secret Greek-letter fraternity.
However, these seven, through patience, sacrifice, botherly love and unabating interest, continued their project in the regular meetings of 1905-07, during which the reports of committees, individual plans and suggestions, were consolidated into the permanent features of the present organization known as the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.
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