Each with histories going back almost 100 years (Michigan’s chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha just celebrated their 100 year anniversary last week) over time each had garnered its own niche among black men.
My first year I had a chance to see friends of mine pledge two other fraternities (Kappa Alpha Psi, Alpha Phi Alpha). It is possible our stories are somehow both correct, but I’m pretty hardheaded, and if I heard my father tell me what he thought he told me I’d have joined another fraternity.) He remembers this as clearly as I remember what I am telling you. He explicitly remembers telling me that if I didn’t become a “Que”, I couldn’t come home. (I say “vividly” in part because my father’s memory of this discussion was very very different. But I should consider joining one of them–Michigan also had chapters of Alpha Phi Alpha, Kappa Alpha Psi, and Phi Beta Sigma on campus. I didn’t have to join Omega Psi Phi, he said, because Omega wasn’t for everybody. I vividly recall him saying to me that given the racism at Michigan’s campus I needed to have a group of people that I could count on, a group of people that I could trust no matter what. My father–an Omega–talked to me about fraternities. Now looking back on it, I knew I’d join a fraternity sometime next the end of my first year. We were all middle/working class kids living in and around post-industrial cities (Detroit and Flint). The first time I’d met Glenn was at the first interest meeting. I’d tutored Sam and Darius during their first semester in school (Summer 1988), and considered Darius a friend. At the first meeting the chapter held for interested individuals there were seventeen of us.īy the end of the process only four remained. Samuel Kirkland, myself, Darius McKinney, and Glenn Eden. On April 18, 1989, twenty years and one day ago I became a member Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, the first black fraternity established at a historically black college (Howard), having pledged at one of the oldest chapters in the fraternity, Phi Chapter (the University of Michigan). ( editor’s note: I wrote the original version on April 19, 2009.)
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