Five Decades of Black Greeks at Duke
Alumni panel shares memories of groups that built support for Black students
Michael Morgan said Duke’s support of BLGOs during the 1970s was in concert with the national zeitgeist that embraced popular Black culture.
“At that time in the culture of America, it was great to be Black and beautiful, and to recognize that in the early to mid-1970s, pop culture was embracing Black lives,” Michael Morgan said.
“‘James Brown was my main man. Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ still resonated. Shirley Chisholm was running for president in 1972. The leading television shows of the era were Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons and Good Times, and that was the time for blaxploitation movies, led by Shaft and Superfly. They were all the rage.
“So we had a way of knowing it was great to be Black. We wore our dashikis. We were wearing our afros, wearing our necklaces, and really promoting the culture and Duke was sensitive to that.”
Morgan noted that the start of Black fraternities and sororities on campus was closely watched by Durham’s Black citizens.
Duke, he explained, was “an impenetrable fortress back in the day,” walled off from Durham, particularly the Black community.
“And there were those in Durham that recognized that if Duke was willing to accept Black culture, then now is the time to make some inroads into Duke from ‘our Durham,’” Morgan added.
Gail Morgan said that the planning for a Delta Sigma Theta chapter at Duke started with eight women seated at a table in the Cambridge Inn on West Campus. She said BGLO’s arrival at Duke “did not pop up in a vacuum.”
She pointed to the legacy of the African American students admitted to the university several years before, “who fought for an African American Studies department, and increased faculty and increased representation, paved the way for us.”In addition to support from the Duke administration, the Morgans credited the respective chapters of the neighboring historically Black college, North Carolina Central University, for their sponsorship.
The panel included Jaden Faunteroy, a Duke junior who is the undergraduate president of the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the governing body for Black Greek Letter organizations that’s known as the Divine Nine.
Faunteroy, a member of Zeta Phi Beta, noted the ongoing pushback against a “Black is beautiful,” sentiment characterized by the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of affirmative action, and political attacks targeting diversity, equity and inclusion on college campuses.
“We are still dealing with some of the same things we’ve dealt with in the past, in a different realm, in a different world where social media is where people learn to discuss things that maybe we shouldn’t be discussing on social media,” Faunteroy said.
“In a world where we’re just trying to recover after the pandemic, in a world where Black people are constantly subjugated for different reasons, but often for the same reason that you are in a world where Duke doesn’t often feel safe for Black students.”
The fourth panelist, Tamara Brown, is provost for academic affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington, and co-editor of the 2005 book, African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and The Vision.
And what a legacy.
BGLO members who have had an exponential impact on the lives of all people, at home and abroad, after emerging during what historian Rayford Logan described as the “nadir” of race relations in America.
The emergence of BGLOs at Duke in the 1970s offered Black students a way “to retain our Blackness in this predominantly white institution,” said Michael Morgan, who was a Duke sophomore in 1974.
Morgan said that Duke’s Black students shared a common bond that was most obvious during mealtimes, when they all sat together at the Cambridge Inn, huddled around a handful of tables.
Morgan said the campus organizations all had a plaque on the wall where their members sat.
“We Black students had a Black fist, decorated with red, black and green,” Morgan said. “Red for the blood, black for the people, green for the land…and we rallied around that as our common bond.”
“But with that shared experience, you could tell there was something missing,” he said. “There was something personal within that was lacking.”
Morgan said it was “a random day,” when he looked at a bulletin board in the dining hall and noticed an inconspicuous yellow sheet of paper that read, “Anyone interested in forming a chapter of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, please sign up.’”
That scrawled message was a trigger for Morgan. His maternal grandfather was an “‘Omega man’…at Lincoln University with Langston Hughes.”
Morgan signed the yellow sheet of paper.
He became a member of Omega’s charter line at Duke. They were known as “The 13 Commandments.”
Gail Morgan said Delta Sigma Theta is a now a global organization whose members are part of local communities and organizations, as well as premier and influential African American organizations.
BGLOs have a legacy of addressing the most profound challenges that have affected Black people, and a mission to “uplift the race,” in the face of systemic racism, and inequality.
In addition to the Morgans, there has been an impressive cadre of Duke alumni and professors who are members of BLGOs.
Samuel Dubois Cook, the university’s first tenured African American professor, was an Omega Psi Phi.
The celebrated Duke historian John Hope Franklin was an Alpha Phi Alpha.
Lisa Borders, a Duke alumna and former president of the Women’s National Basketball Association, and Karla Holloway, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, are both Alpha Kappa Alphas.
Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies, is a Phi Beta Sigma.
The panelists were asked what BLGOs can do to address white supremacy.
Gail Morgan said by pledging she soon realized, “we are powerful, and we are everywhere we need to be. The problem is we have not figured out how to leverage our power…we can advance. We have a common shared goal. But to fight this beast that has presented itself before us — because this is Jim Crow 2.0. --- to fight this beast, we must acknowledge and exercise the power of that leverage in the way I know we can.”
Michael Morgan pointed to the importance of voting, and the “unitary force” of BGLOs’ ability to influence election outcomes.
“The fact is…the Divine Nine can control every single outcome of every single election,” said Morgan, who later added that when it comes to systemic racism, members of the Divine Nine have “got to be willing to call it out.”
“Some folks just don’t get it,” he added. “Some folks say that when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, we no longer had a race problem. How foolish was that? Especially when we look back and say that because Barack Obama was elected president. Eight years later that gave us Donald Trump.
“That was the clapback.”