Crystal Malone Brown, tried to integrate sorority in 1940s, dies at 94

[moe.ron]

Crystal Malone Brown, a Washington-born teacher who married the first Black graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and who, as a young woman, garnered national press coverage when she tried to integrate an all-White sorority at the University of Vermont, died Feb. 25 at a nursing home in Blue Bell, Pa. She was 94 and had moved to Blue Bell from Chevy Chase, Md., in 2018.

The cause was atherosclerosis, said a stepdaughter, Willetta Brown West.

Mrs. Brown — then known as Crystal Malone — was a junior on the Burlington campus of the University of Vermont in October 1945 when she was accepted as the first and only Black member of the Alpha Xi Delta sorority.

“I had grown up in a segregated world,” Mrs. Brown later told the publication Vermont Quarterly. “When I was asked to join Alpha Xi Delta, I remember being pleased — the spoken emotions and feelings after the war made me think it was possible.”

But Beverly Robinson, the national sorority president, rejected Mrs. Brown’s admission into the half-century-old organization and ordered the university’s chapter closed when Mrs. Brown refused to withdraw her membership. Her advice to the pledge: “Life is selective, and maybe it’s just as well to learn it while we are young.”

White members of Alpha Xi Delta’s campus chapter came to Mrs. Brown’s defense, and the local newspaper, the Burlington Daily News, heralded them as “heroines of peace.” But the University of Vermont president, John S. Millis, announced that the college would “take no stand” in the dispute.

National media outlets began to cover the rift between the university’s administration and its students. Patricia Pringle, president of the Alpha Xi Delta chapter, told Time magazine she was “proud” to call Mrs. Brown a sorority sister and said fellow members “have no intention of revoking the original pledge.“

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