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The legacy of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority stretches from founder Ethel Hedgemon Lyle, whose grandparents were slaves, to Vice President Kamala Harris. Its reach stretches across college campuses nationwide, including the University at Albany.
“Before I became a member, I wanted to be like women in this organization, and I want to follow in their footsteps. And I feel like people are able to look up to us because of the things that we do in our community and what we have done, with Kamala Harris being in the White House,” said D’Shaya James, a member of AKA’s Pi Kappa undergraduate chapter at UAlbany.
Other prominent members, past and present, include actress Phylicia Rashad; author Toni Morrison; Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer, one of two Black women currently leading a Fortune 500 company; and Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician who calculated the trajectory of Apollo 11.
Locally, Kaweeda G. Adams, superintendent of the Albany City School District; Nettie Crossman, president of Schenectady’s Safe Inc.; and city court Judge Teneka Frost-Amusa, the first Black judge appointed in Schenectady, are all members of the Delta Mu Omega Chapter, the Capital Region’s graduate chapter of AKA.
“It’s amazing. It’s very motivating. It’s very inspiring,” said UAlbany student and Pi Kappa member Jada Ryder. “I have a lot of added value. I’ve become more of a leader, I’ve communicated better. I’ve gained sisters, I’ve gained friends, I feel like I’ve gained a lot and it can’t be taken away.”
In the beginning…
When Alpha Kappa Alpha was started in 1908 at Howard University, the Voting Rights Act was more than 50 years away. The 19th Amendment was still 12 years away. Eighty-nine Black people were lynched that year.
The nine women who founded Alpha Kappa Alpha did so in the hopes of making a positive impact on their community, said Glenda Glover, international president and CEO. They wanted to promote education and give Black women — and men — “a way out.”
The emphasis on education is present in today’s AKA. Pi Kappa holds programs at UAlbany that bring business owners (often Delta Mu Omega members) to campus, and teach financial literacy and study skills. Delta Mu Omega is currently running a college admissions process program that helps high school students with everything from researching colleges through to the application process.
AKA members and members of other Black sororities, particularly Delta Sigma Theta, participated in the women’s suffrage movement of the 1910s, even though their white counterparts sometimes relegated them to the back of the marches.
That voting rights work is also ongoing. AKA registered more than 250,000 voters for the 2020 election, according to Glover. Those efforts helped put Harris in the White House.
“That’s why I really take pride in our history. Like, we are creating history every single day,” Johann Zephirin, Pi Kappa president at UAlbany, said.
Women’s health, and health care in general, is another of Alpha Kappa Alpha’s focuses.
During the Great Depression, AKA started the Mississippi Health Project to provide health care services to Black people in the Mississippi Delta, who were not served by the state health department.
Nearly 100 years later, Alpha Kappa Alpha revived that work, vaccinating hundreds of people against COVID-19 in the summer of 2021 as well as providing glucose, cholesterol and HIV tests and eye exams.
In the Capital Region, Pi Kappa members run collection drives for menstrual supplies and donate them to UAlbany’s food pantry, while Delta Mu Omega raises money for the American Heart Association with an annual Zumbathon.
Delta Mu Omega, the graduate chapter of AKA, was chartered in 1947 to be a cultural and service organization that could work to improve the welfare of the Black community in the Capital Region. It struggled to attract members and eventually became inactive, but was reactivated in 1966 and has been serving the local community ever since.
“I see the chapter as building on what our international founders created, in creating a space for women, in creating opportunities for women,” said Andrea West, president of Delta Mu Omega and assistant human resources director for the Albany City School District. “We really just try to give back and and we try to build on what our charter members and our founders have started.”
The Pi Kappa undergraduate chapter was chartered in 1990.
“We immediately started programming in the community and on campus,” recalled Sabrina Fontenot, one of the early members. The programming included clean-up projects, drives for the food bank and reading to schoolchildren.
The next generation
“It’s definitely important now to have Black women sitting around the table making a difference and participating in how to change things. Decisions are made in the boardroom,” Glover explained. In addition to “the elements of service,” she said, AKA also teaches members “the elements of leadership.”
AKA’s Leadership Fellows program, which is for undergraduates, focuses on early-stage career development. From leading graduate-level sorority meetings as an undergraduate to Alpha Kappa Alpha’s leadership academies, members learn how to get things done.
“How to get the right job and how to act your first few days on the job,” Glover said. “How to move up, how to understand the mentorship program. You don’t go home after work, we stay there, and then you go out for drinks with them. Even if you want to have a Coke, you go out for drinks with them and learn what’s going on in the company.”
If a graduate chapter is overseeing an undergraduate chapter, as in the case of Delta Mu Omega and Pi Kappa, each undergraduate gets two mentors from the graduate chapter, including one in the same field.
“That helps them to see, to get a bird’s-eye view of, OK, this sorority sister is doing and operating in the role that I want to do in life,” West said.
But being an Alpha Kappa Alpha member is about more than learning practical skills. Leecia Eve, a New York lawyer who worked for U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton and mounted several campaigns for public office in New York, recalled a conversation with her mother about the pride being an AKA member gave her — the kind of pride James Brown sings about in “Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
“In the face of systemic discrimination and violence against the Black community, as well as more subtle forms, as well as so many images and so many messages conveying that Black people were ‘less than,’ here you’re now part of an organization of brilliant Black women who went on to become doctors, lawyers, judges, astronauts, actresses, you name it,” Eve said.
That pride shows, and it’s part of what has attracted new AKA members over the years.
“In the Black community, the AKAs stand for excellence, women that carry themselves with a certain amount of dignity, that are basically good people,” said sorority member and jazz flutist Sherry Winston, who, throughout her storied career, has performed at the White House and at many of the great concert halls. “They’re out to help others, especially other Black women, but other organizations (too). And, you know, I just feel proud to be a member of that particular sorority.”
She initially joined because “it was really a great way of getting to know a particular group of women that had an excellent reputation and also carried themselves with a lot of dignity.”
The same is true for the UAlbany AKA members.
“I looked at the girls on campus who were part of the organization. And they were just everything that I wanted to embody. Everything that they’ve done to the school in terms of service, in terms of building girls up, the programs that they have, just how they act. You know, I feel like an Alpha woman has such a high caliber. And that’s something that to me, I wanted to be part of,” Zephirin said.
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