Question About Old NPC Rules

[sugar and spice]

Originally Posted by naraht

Not sure in which way you fixed my post. Please explain further.

She added the word "officially," meaning that discrimination in many organizations went on past the point where official clauses were removed. (I know that a former poster here talked about a family friend who was African-American and pledged an organization in the early '70s where there was pressure from nationals to depledge her, for example.) For some organizations, there's a difference between the years when organizations removed their discriminatory clauses and the years where the national board actually stopped trying to enforce it.

Originally Posted by Munchkin03

How many officially discriminated? I know it wasn't uncommon among the fraternities, and many of them only removed discriminatory clauses within the last 50-75 years.

I've been trying to find this information for years, and it's surprisingly hard to dig up unless you've got access to all the official documents at headquarters. I know that in the book Bound by a Mighty Vow, the author said that Theta didn't have any written policies (but of course they had unwritten ones). She also cited a 1926 survey of the 17 NPC members stated that 5 of them had official Protestants-only policies. She even mentions that a few chapters kept non-Christians to a percentage of the chapter or even an actual number limit! And information on which organizations had official race-related discrimination policies is even harder to find.

I think a lot of the sororities have refused to confess their previous whites-only/Protestants-only policies out of embarrassment. And they should be embarrassed about it--but I don't think there's any reason why they should be more embarrassed than the organizations who didn't have written policies but did have unwritten ones. (Which, uh, is basically all of them.) Nobody's hands are clean in this--even the historically Jewish groups tended to discriminate against less assimilated, more "foreign" Jewish girls. I don't think that the existence of official policies signifies much--I'm just interested in it from the standpoint of historical curiosity. I wish the groups would put it out there.