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Omega Psi Phi, the first national fraternity founded at an HBCU, was born of the idealism and persistance of its four founders:three stellar undergraduates and the faculty advisor they chose to shepherd them in their quest to form a brotherhood which would inspire student leaders bound by bonds of "religion, culture and tradition." The three three Juniors of the class of 1913 at Howard University in Washington D.C., Edgar A. Love (an honor student, member of the varsity debating team, football team, and president of the KA Debating Society who later became a bishop of the United Methodist Church), Oscar J. Cooper (a lab assistant to Assoc. professor Ernest E. Just who served as a noted physician in Philadephia for 50 years) and Frank Coleman (an honor student in physics who graduated with highest honors and later served as professor and chair of Howard's Dept. of Physics for many years), were known on Howard's campus as the "Three Musketeers" because of their inseparable friendship. Bishop Love once stated that the first time he met Prof. Coleman they became friends and he nominated him for president of the freshman class.
They wanted to form an inclusive brotherhood based on the intrinsic characterists of the man as brother and scholar, and not on class,caste or any other extrinsic human category, which they saw in the other social fraternity on campus at the time, Alpha Phi Alpha. In an interview in the early '70s before he died, Bishop Love recounts that then President Wilbur Thirkield of Howard asked the three founders in his office why didn't they want to join to join the fraternity already on campus, he stated that it was a social club, not a fraternity.
In order to realize their dreams, they knew they needed guidance. They chose then Assoc. Professor Ernest E. Just, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth who the only person to graduate Magna Cum Laude from his class at Dartmouth and who excelled in the Classics(Greek), English and Biology. He once spent a large portion of one of his terms working on a concordance for the work of Demosthenes, only only to be crushed to discover that a German scholar had already accomplished this task. He would become the first recipient of the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP, widely considered to be the highest award an African American can be bestowed, for his research in biology. Dr. Just encourgaged the develpment of student life at Howard, encouraging the development of theatre on campus, and he mentored students and played tennis with them, etc. He was was centrally responsible for helping develop the ritualistic and constititional foundations of the Fraternity. Dr. Just was a seminal thinker in embryology and he was lauded by European scholars.
With this foundation, Omega Psi Phi has flourshed for almost a century.
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