The Northeast’s First Black Fraternity Celebrates 50 Years and Looks to the Future

The Northeast’s First Black Fraternity Celebrates 50 Years and Looks to the Future

Forged against the backdrop of the unrest of the civil rights movement, the Omicron chapter of Iota Phi Theta helped the university’s black students find purpose and community. The founders hope to extend this tradition to a new generation.

By the summer of 1974, Boston had reached a boiling point. A judge’s ruling forcing the school system to desegregate — transporting black students to majority-white neighborhood schools and vice versa — fueled riots across the city. Opponents of the plan besieged City Hall and neighborhoods affected by the decision, including Roxbury, near Northeastern’s campus in Boston.

Amidst the chaos, a newly formed group of brothers stepped in to help. Many escorted black women attending college to their dorms, amid violent protests elsewhere in the city. Another, the late John Glenn, was a part-time school bus driver in Southie, completing his routes as rocks shattered windows and rioters swarmed the road. “It was a tumultuous time in Boston,” recalls Shelley Stewart, a 1975 graduate. “Recruiting was important, for us and for the community.

They were, and are, founding members of the Omicron chapter of Iota Phi Theta – the first black fraternity at Northeastern University. Forged in the social unrest of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the global fraternity is a renowned institution in black circles of higher education, with 300 chapters and 50,000 registered members across the United States and as far afield as Japan and South Korea. At its peak, the Northeast chapter had some of the most illustrious members of the student body as “Iotas” – Division I athletes, activists, college radio DJs and student council members.

On September 22, the Omicron Chapter will launch a weekend of celebrations for its 50th anniversary, with members from the past five decades coming to the John O’Bryant African American Institute on Northeastern’s Boston campus to reconnect and exchange stories of their Iota days. . They also hope to revive the Omicron chapter. Thanks in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic hampering recruiting efforts, there have been no Iotas at Northeastern since 2019. But former members believe there is a vital place for the fraternity in the future of the university.

“It’s a reclamation project for us,” says Keith Motley, past president of the Omicron chapter. After graduating from Northeastern, Motley became the university’s dean of students in the 1980s and, later, UMass Boston’s first black provost. He hopes the anniversary celebrations will generate interest in possible pledges. “We want to build enough capacity so people can return to campus and help the organization thrive.” »

More mature students

The first Iota Phi Theta chapter was founded in 1963 at Morgan State University in Maryland. This has its roots in the militaristic tendency of the civil rights movement. Many early members were involved in the Black Power and Pan-Africanism movements; the organization credits Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael among its early influences.

From the beginning, Iota was more an extension of the surrounding black community than a closed-loop academic fraternity. Many of the founding members were older students, juggling family, work and school. “Our organization was founded by men who went to school at night,” Motley says. “They entered into this notion of brotherhood in a different way…they were more mature. »

This was the case for Jimmy Martin, who graduated with an engineering degree in 1976 and was part of the second class of the Omicron chapter. Before enrolling full-time at Northeastern, Martin took night classes while working assembling electronic parts for a company in nearby Norwood. “At first I wasn’t interested in (joining),” he recalled. “I had just transitioned from full-time work to full-time school and was trying to focus.” But he had friends in the founding class, and it was hard to ignore the enthusiastic talk about the new fraternity around campus. Years later, he became a “grand Polaris” – a senior officer – of the national Iotas organization from 1984 to 1990.

For Martin, joining the fraternity was like a history lesson. He attended a predominantly white technical high school in Boston, where, he says, “you didn’t necessarily learn a lot about black history,” and the turbulence of the civil rights movement in the South was rarely discussed . “I learned more at Northeastern.”

The university’s African American Institute, which served as the Iotas’ home base before and after the fraternity’s formation, “had a lot of information like that,” he said.

Through the fraternity, he also connected with Iotas in the South and at several HBCUs, where Greek organizations were — and remain — a large part of black college life. “They are a vital part of the Black community,” says C. Hawkins, director of student engagement and advancement in Northeastern’s alumni office. “Outside the Church, black Greek organizations are next.” Iota Phi Theta is a member of “The Divine Nine” – a historic group of fraternities and sororities that counts luminaries among its ranks, including Vice President Kamala Harris.

Hawkins, who is working with founding members to plan the anniversary celebrations, says many black students who attend predominantly white universities benefit from scholarships from the black Greek community. When he arrived on campus as a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, they were among the first to greet him. For first-generation black students, he says, Greek organizations offer “a guaranteed niche of people who understand what it’s like.” Plus, “they throw the best parties on campus.”

The Omicron chapter was part of a larger effort to bring these benefits to students in the northeastern United States, and the founding members devoted much time and energy to expanding the fraternity to other campuses. On weekends, Martin said, they piled onto Glenn’s school bus for road trips, recruiting and attending events at schools in several states. Less than a year and a half after the Omicron chapter formed at Northeastern, Boston College and American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts, had their own Iota chapters. Omicron’s first class of engagements in 1973, called the “Lost Colony” line, consisted of 33 engagements; the chapter had 73 members at the end of the academic year.

Irving Bell, a 1977 civil engineering graduate, was in the second group. “At the end of my first year, I realized that something was missing in my social life at Northeastern,” he recalls. The Iotas “provided a great social outlet” and the fraternity’s financial aid “allowed me to focus on my studies without constantly searching for scholarship opportunities,” he said.