Quote:
Originally posted by OTW
In "Our Kind of People: The Story of America's Black Upper Class", by Lawrence Otis Graham -- it is mentioned that Barbara Delaney was the first African-American woman initiated into the NPC when she became a member of Sigma Kappa at Cornell University in either 1956 or 1957.
Obviously I am not an SK, so only SKs would be able to verify that info via their sister directory.
I did a search of the Cornell University Greek Life site and did not find an existing Sigma Kappa chapter there. Still, the reasons why that chapter may or may not have closed is no one else's business but the members of Sigma Kappa.
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Ah! I found my copy of Graham's book. In chapter 5 'The Right Fraternities and Sororities', page 87, first paragraph, it says:
Barbara Collier Delany's experience at Cornell in 1956 underscored the problems waiting for Black students who faced the white fraternities and sororities operating on white college campuses. Delany made national headlines in 1956 when, as a student at the Ivy League campus, she was offered membership in the white sorority of Sigma Kappa. She remembers being one of only a handful of blacks at the college at the time. "I was the first black ever to be offered membership in a white sorority," says Delany, who had grown up in a family of privilege. She belonged to Jack and Jill, debuted with the Girl Friends, and graduated from the elite all-girl Hunter High School in Manhattan. "The girls in the sorority were very nice to me, but the officials at the national headquarters were furious, and they told the students that they had better reject me or headquarters would shut down the sorority's chapter at Cornell, " says Delany, who still corresponds with some of those classmates. "When the white students refused to kick me out, headquarters shut down the sorority."
So, if there is no longer an active chapter of SK at Cornell, then this is probably why.
Again, for much of their history NPCs
were historically White.
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