Sigma Alpha Epsilon was born, in secret, on March 9, 1856, “in the late hours of a stormy night” by the “flicker of dripping candles” in a mansion in Tuscaloosa, home to the University of Alabama. The original intent of the eight founding members, an SAE brother wrote decades later, was “to confine the fraternity to the southern states.”
Instead, SAE grew far beyond its Southern redoubt. It took 27 years to open the first Northern chapter, because “to go to a northern college would mean to lower the standard of the fraternity by taking unworthy men,” William C. Levere, a devoted SAE member, wrote in his 1916 book A Paragraph History of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Its notable alumni list grew to include author William Faulkner, U.S. President William McKinley, and scores of professional athletes. Today, the fraternity boasts 15,000 members at 219 chapters and 20 colonies around the nation. Upon induction, pledges have to memorize the creed, called "The True Gentlemen," part of which reads, “A true gentleman is a man ... who thinks of the rights and feelings of others.”
But on March 8, 2015, a grainy cell phone video of fraternity members from the University of Oklahoma’s SAE chapter shouting a racist chant spread across the internet. The young, mostly white men — dressed in formalwear and apparently emboldened by alcohol — were on a private bus heading to a mixer commemorating the fraternity’s 159th birthday when they broke into a version of a segregationist hymn:
“There will never be a n****r at SAE ...
you can hang him from a tree,
but he'll never sign with me;
there will never be a n****r at SAE."
The chant was no mere isolated incident. A BuzzFeed News review of SAE’s own historic documents and its appearances in news reports — along with interviews of several people involved in past racially charged incidents — shows that the fraternity does have a long history of generally unchallenged intolerance toward minorities that met such little resistance it became ingrained in the fraternity’s very culture.
(BuzzFeed News sought to speak to every living person named in this article. In instances where people do not provide an interview, BuzzFeed News could not reach them for comment. It should also be noted that many fraternities, not just SAE, have struggled with integrating and have also received attention for apparently racist acts.)
Joseph Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty
To partly understand that chant’s place in history, look back to the University of Georgia 54 years ago. A version of the chant was sung on January 9, 1961 – the day Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to step onto the campus after a judge's ruling.
That evening, hundreds of well-dressed and white students — including fraternity brothers — watched a smiling student carry a black-faced effigy across campus. It was then hung from a noose slung over the the school’s historic black iron archway.
The students chanted, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate...eight, six, four, two, we don’t want no jigaboo” — a popular rallying cry for whites protesting desegregation in schools around the nation. They also yelled, “There’ll never be a n****r in the [fraternity] house,” inserting various fraternities’ names, according to Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University who wrote a paper on the chant. (While many fraternities attended, it’s unclear if SAE was there.)
After the cell phone video depicting the University of Oklahoma students was discovered earlier this year, outrage spread fast and discipline was swift. Administrators shut the fraternity down. Two students were expelled and later publicly apologized. The fraternity’s headquarters announced investigations into all reported racist acts, started a hotline, and appointed a director of diversity. “The song is horrific and does not at all reflect our values as an organization,” Executive Director Blaine Ayers said in a March statement.
But as more stories of alleged racism in different SAE chapters nationwide subsequently came to light, SAE was forced to publicly confront the idea that the incident at the University of Oklahoma was not isolated and that the quick action taken was a rarity.
The incidents stretch back to more than 150 years ago — when one of SAE’s earliest members argued in Congress in support of slavery — and continue up to March 2015.
The fraternity hosted minstrel shows in the 1900s, “Martin Luther King Jr. trash” parties in the 1980s, and “n*****s and hoes” parties in 2010. Blackface was used in the 1930s, and a white brother impersonated Tiger Woods in the 2000s. Confederate flags were draped proudly in some SAE houses from at least 1950 to 2015. The institution of slavery, supported by an SAE member in the 1860s, was celebrated as part of a chapter’s party in 1987.
And the segregationist chant sung at the University of Oklahoma was apparently longstanding tradition. The university’s investigation of the incident found that older brothers taught the chant to the younger ones during a “leadership cruise.”
“While there is no indication that the chant was part of the formal teaching of the national organization,” OU President David Boren said in March, “it does appear that the chant was widely known and informally shared amongst members.”
“This is not an accident,” Cohen, the NYU professor, told BuzzFeed News. “It shows that a larger fraternity milieu that existed during the desegregation era has been preserved. You put in a time capsule and half a century later it exists in its pristine form.”
Cohen said that such racist chants must have been preserved by the fraternity’s alumni who “were never really happy about desegregation and resisted it.”
In most of the alleged racist incidents, universities and SAE chapters followed a standard response: The chapter apologized for the actions of a few and vowed to teach members about diversity. In some cases, the universities levied sanctions, including interim suspension, against the chapters. But most disciplinary efforts went by the wayside or drew only slap-on-the-wrist penalties from university or Greek officials. And today most university and SAE officials, when asked by BuzzFeed News, can’t fully explain whether those actions fostered lasting diversity and tolerance.
Until this year, SAE had never announced a fraternity-wide plan to counter racism in its ranks, despite numerous documented instances of racial intolerance. The result, Cohen said, is that for more than a century and a half, SAE couldn’t banish tactics seen in the era of Jim Crow from their place on fraternity row.
Segregation and Confederate Nostalgia
SAE says its creed, known as “The True Gentleman,” is “based upon the ideals set forth by our Founding Fathers.”
Several of those founders and some of SAE’s earliest pledges worked to keep segregation alive in the United States. Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II, one of the first initiates at SAE’s University of Mississippi chapter — who went on to become a senator and an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — delivered a speech at the Capitol in 1860 justifying slavery.
“Our proposition is that when these two races are brought into contact, the supremacy of the white man must be acknowledged,” he said. When Lamar died in 1893, he was buried in a casket adorned with a flower arrangement fashioned after the badge of SAE.
Of all the college fraternities, SAE sent the largest percentage of its members to the Civil War when it began in 1861, Levere wrote. More than 60 died. Six of its seven founders wore the Confederate Army’s gray uniform, including the fraternity’s chief founder Noble DeVotie, who Levere said was the “first man to lose his life in the Civil War” when he drowned after falling off a wharf.
At that time even discussions of race were discouraged. SAE made that clear in the 1888 issue of its magazine, The Record. An editorial in the magazine disapproved of another Southern fraternity — Kappa Alpha — for inserting a Harper’s Weekly article on race problems in the South in its journal. “We take it for granted the qualification for membership in K. A. is at least ‘male white,’ and further than that we can't see how the order — as a fraternity — can be interested in race issues or other similar political problems of our land.”
As SAE flourished, its brothers moved on to positions of power, taking action that had lasting negative political and social repercussions for racial equality.
Member John Crepps Wickliffe Beckham, the 35th governor of Kentucky, was “admired” by SAE, according to an issue of The Record from 1900. Beckham passed the Day Law in 1904, which mandated racial segregation in all schools in the state for nearly half a century. The law was proposed by a legislator, Carl Day, who called for an end to the “contamination” of white students at college.
Clifford Davis was a Ku Klux Klan leader, a Democratic U.S. representative, and an SAE member from Tennessee. He was also Memphis’ commissioner of public safety in the 1920s. Under Davis, 70% of the Memphis police force were Klan members, worsening race relations in the city, according to the 1993 book Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers by Michael K. Honey. According to Honey, police violence was rampant against labor and civil rights organizers through the '30s. By the '40s, “the only connection Negroes have had to the Memphis police force has been Negro heads colliding with nightsticks in the hands of white policemen,” Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche observed in his 1973 book The Political Status of the Negro in The Age of FDR.
Via youtube.com
Several fraternities, including SAE, grew increasingly politicized as a response to President Harry Truman’s establishment of a civil rights committee in 1946 and desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. Around this time, the Confederate flag, once largely confined to tributes to Confederate dead, became a symbol of “resistance to federally enforced integration,” according to a 2000 inquiry by the Georgia state government. Many fraternities adopted them for this reason. "Kappa Alpha, Kappa Sigma, S. A. E., and Phi Delta Theta fraternities have brought Confederate and Alabama state flags out of the mothballs and once more they are flapping in the warm Southern breeze," reporter Jim Harland wrote in a July 1948 issue of the Crimson-White, the University of Alabama's student newspaper.
Today, the Confederate flag can be spotted in photos behind college students posing at SAE parties.
SAE spokesperson Brandon E. Weghorst told BuzzFeed News in June that the fraternity does not endorse the Confederate flag. “Never has it been part of our insignia, emblems or marks since our founding,” he said. “Although we believe in freedom of speech, we reiterate to our members that the flag should not be used in conjunction with Sigma Alpha Epsilon.”
Still, the Confederate flag was seen flying on the front lawns of the SAE house at Valdosta State University in Georgia as recently as 2009.
And former and current students at Oklahoma State University (OSU) told BuzzFeed News that the Confederate flag was a permanent fixture in one of the rooms at the SAE house dating back to 1987. The flag was visible to anyone who walked across the street.
It was only on March 8, 2015 — the night that Oklahoma University’s SAE members were caught singing the racist chant — that the flag was finally taken down after a report about it in O’Colly, the student newspaper.
In recent years, several Southern fraternities, including Kappa Alpha and SAE, have come under fire for wearing Confederate uniforms and costumes at social gatherings and hosting slavery-themed parties. One of the most important social events at the University of Georgia’s SAE chapter is the Magnolia Ball, described — in a 1960 issue of The Record — as a spring activity where the “clock was turned back 100 years to the ‘gracious living days’ of Southern belles with their [hoop skirts] and bonnets and stately Southern gentlemen with long plantation coats and top hats.”
A similar party at SAE’s Oklahoma State University chapter is the “Plantation Ball,” described as a “prestigious three-night date party” and one of the “premiere date parties on campus” held during the last week of April to commemorate the fraternity’s Founder’s Day.
In 1987, Paul Littlejohn, the then-president of the NAACP chapter at Oklahoma State University, had just left his first meeting with the NAACP student body when he saw about 100 SAE brothers and pledges outside the chapter’s house across the street from his apartment. They were celebrating an event leading up to the Plantation Ball.
In an interview with BuzzFeed News in May, Littlejohn, 49, said he saw them from a distance and thought, “Oh, they have some black pledges now. I’ve never seen that on the all-white fraternity and sorority row.”
But when one of the pledges came closer, Littlejohn realized he was wearing blackface and was dressed in “raggedy clothes” — like a slave. One of the SAE brothers came over — all the brothers were dressed up as plantation owners — and put a rope around the pledge’s neck. “Come on, n****r, let’s sing,” Littlejohn heard him say.
He described how some pledges with ropes around their necks serenaded the sorority houses with the “old Negro spiritual — ‘Swing low, sweet chariot.’” One of the brothers, who was playing a banjo, gleefully asked Littlejohn to join them.
“I was outraged,” Littlejohn said. “I couldn’t believe this was happening in front of my eyes.”
The next day, hundreds of students from OSU and Langston University marched on the OSU campus in a peaceful protest. According to an Associated Press report of the incident, SAE apologized to the black students and said they would take necessary action to avoid repeating this “regrettable incident.”
Nick Oxford / AP Photo
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