Originally uploaded by Unbowed.
I received this picture from one of my younger Chapter Brothers.
What stands out about this picture are three things.
The first is that I’m pretty sure that the Brother in the bottom right corner was my Uncle Kay. Komuria Harden went to medical school at Michigan in the early twenties. Was one of the first black medical school deans of Howard University Medical School. He died four years before I was born I believe, in 1965.
My father (who is also a member, inducted at Lambda Chapter while in Los Angeles) tells people to this day that he told me to either join Omega Psi Phi or not to come home. This isn’t what really happened. What REALLY happened was that he told me that because I was going to a school like Michigan I needed to be part of a group whose members would have my back. Black fraternities better served that purpose in his estimation than any other institutional vehicle (he was and is right about this). He suggested that I join ONE of them…but while he had preferences, it was up to ME to decide.
So I took a look around. One of my best friends at the time pledged another fraternity. But his experience was particularly brutal and while he graduated he did so some years after he was supposed to. I liked (and still like) the members of that Chapter a great deal…but I felt that at the time they weren’t serious about education, and were more interested in serving the campus population through entertainment than through education. Another group of friends I had were interested in another fraternity…but while I liked the members of that organization well enough, the reasons my friends (and others) gave for wanting to join had more to do with wanting prestige while not wanting to pledge hard. Further they didn’t have the same class affinity (working class) I did.
So what I wanted was an organization that would be about brotherhood, about working class black people (and about the nationalist education of black people). And I wanted an organization that pledged hard…not brutally hard, but hard enough. These values are values I received from my father. So even though he never said “pledge this or don’t come home” I ended up going that route anyway because of the values I received from him.
Years later after becoming a member I was browsing through the books at the Shrine of the Black Madonna’s book store, and I found a book detailing the lives of the first black Michigan med school graduates. I picked up the book knowing that my uncle (who I didn’t know much about) would be in it. And he was.
Among his organizational affiliations? Omega Psi Phi.
So the first thing that stands out is deeply personal. Even though I explicitly joined the organization of my father because the chapter represented the values that I received through my father…I also ended up joining the organization of my MATERNAL uncle, without even knowing it.
The second thing that stands out is the skin variation. By now many of us are familiar with the way that class is reproduced in black communities through skin tone. Light skinned American blacks tend to get more “stuff” than those who are darker in hue. Before large numbers of African and Caribbean blacks entered into prestigious American institutions it was uncommon to see darker skinned blacks at schools like Michigan. Anecdotal data suggests that some of the fraternities and sororities replicated this dynamic. We don’t see that here. There are some light skinned Brothers, some brown skinned Brothers, and some dark skinned Brothers as well. In 2007 this is common place. In 1922? Not so much.
The final thing? I still keep up with what is going on at Michigan. Although many graduates black and white come and go…I made sure I left my mark. People still know my name 20 years later. Phi chapter hasn’t been this big since the seventies. But even more important, with a couple of exceptions, NO black fraternity has.
Les:
Pictures like these are more beautiful to me than the finest productions of the Italian Renaissance–not for their surface aesthetic qualities, but for what they represent. They represent us at our very strongest, at are very best. These are the types of pictures we should never stop admiring.
You know, it wasn’t until I read up on the history and cultures of South Africa that I realized how much they mirrored the U.S. on this. There, they had (and probably still have) Whites, Coloreds (those who would be labeled “light-skinned” or “mixed-race” Blacks in the U.S.), and Blacks. The lighter one got in Apartheid-era South Africa, the more prestige one enjoyed due to one’s phenotypical traits, all other things remaining equal.
When skin hue matters that much in a society, it probably matters so much because the dominant culture benefits the most from everyone placing different values on hue.
this picture is a gem. i’ve been using my flickr site to put up digital pictures that I’ve taken. But what I’m thinking about doing is starting another site just to scan in pictures like this…of my own family and of black history in general. There’s already one other person that has been engaged in a similar process.
On skin hue…
I’ve been really interested in the way that race is reproduced over space and time. this is one of the reasons I’ve been putting up so much french hip-hop. Here we have a society (france) in which race officially is nonexistent. The state doesn’t collect data on race, and neither do most institutions of civil society. but yet and still people we’d think of as “black” still “represent” like black men. How does this cross borders? How is this passed down?
Amazing Doc.you capture the legacy
Uncle K had one child, a daughter. There is no doubt in my mind that he smiled down on you and continues to smile as you follow in his footsteps first as a U of M student, then as a fraternity brother and finally as a professor and scholar.
This is amazing. History is something that we should never let go of. It is pictures and stories like this that remind us of our purpose in life being greater than ourselves.
My almost girlfriend lived in the Bronx back in 1980-something. I went to visit her one day and she broke out the photo album. In it were hundreds, literally hundreds of photos like this one.
Her father and members of his family had been members of a fraternal organization in NY called ‘The Metropolitans’. It was one of apparently many old social clubs that were popular in the 40s and 50s. It was just an astounding trip to see all of these young fashionable people and know that they stuck together socially. I don’t recall if they had any type of paper bag test, nor do I recall them being particularly light or dark, but I do remember that the Metropolitans were one of many and that all of them were gone.
In my reading of American history, the integration of the civil service and the falling of the color bar for professional service obviated the need for blacks in the managerial and professional classes to remain absolutely wed to a black clientele. In both directions, integration decimated that intimacy of black supply and black demand.
When I went to college in 1982, one of my sponsors was a black ladies bridge club. Their scholarship was one of the smallest, but I remember it most fondly. They were the only sponsors I wrote back to personally after thanking them for the award. I wanted to let them know how I was doing in college. It’s difficult for me to imagine any such thing happening today, although I’m sure it must happen somewhere – but I’ve always been acutely aware of how we have become less dependent on the black upper class.
Old photos such as yours trigger these kinds of thoughts and memories and I think of the sort of men I aspired to be when reading ‘Who’s Who in Negro America’. These days I am lamenting the fall from grace and dissolution of that social monopoly, even though I know that we brought it upon ourselves.
I’ve often wondered how black fraternities are fairing on university campuses these days. We hear so much about how black women outnumber black men on US campuses, and seeing a sorority with a line of 70+ has become almost passe.
From the Archives: Phi Chapter 1922 http://t.co/EDwGBc17