Where Are The Divine Nine ?
The music begins to play. Three women dressed in blue and gold appear from the top of the hill with one woman in black leading them. Linked arm in arm the three women begin to step and slowly make their way down hill. As the music plays, they step through the crowd until they reach the designated area. Each woman wears a mask, except the leader. One by one, the women remove their masks, present their names, and proudly exclaim their membership to Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority Inc. Although the crowd is small and filled mostly with white students, the women continue their chants, songs, and presentations well until the sun has set.
In 1962, Stetson University became the first private non-Historically Black College and University (HBCU) university in the state of Florida to become integrated. After decades of racially integrated education, Stetson’s first NPHC organizations, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., were welcomed on to Stetson’s campus. The National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) was established in 1930 and consists of four sororities and five fraternities commonly referred to as the Divine Nine. In a still extremely segregated America, African Americans were not allowed to join “white” Greek letter organizations. The NPHC was created at Howard University in Washington D.C. to try and combat the issue of segregation in white Greek organizations. Like their predecessors, NPHC organizations had similar goals. They were designed so that its members participated in community service and awareness, and encouraged academic and personal success and growth. All Greek organizations — white, black, or otherwise — must establish chapters on a college or university campus and Stetson was no different. However, after only a short time, about 10 years, NPHC organizations disappeared from the campus white Greek organizations remained.
The last active chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. at Stetson was in 2005 and it wasn’t until 2013 that a different NPHC organization, Sigma Gamma Rho, made their debut on the campus. In 2017, Sigma Gamma Rho is the only historically Black Greek letter organization on campus, there are six other sororities and seven fraternities, including the newly added sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta.
Most students in the Stetson community recognize the presence Greek life has on campus yet many African American students feel as though there are not enough options for them to become involved in Greek life. There are no rules within either governing body that state that a person can be denied membership to a Greek organization based upon their race; however, there are stigmas attached to African Americans who join “white” Greek organizations. When it comes to retention rates of African American students at Stetson, Trinity Johnson, former president of the Black Student Association (BSA) expressed that from her experience, “many students leave Stetson because they don’t feel connected to the community.”
A former Stetson student and member of BSA transferred to the University of Central Florida as a sophomore after she felt that she wasn’t being given the opportunities that her friends had at HBCUs.
“My friends would call and tell me about the step shows they had and how they wanted to pledge a specific organization and I was jealous. I knew that if I stayed at Stetson, I couldn’t have that.”
Besides BSA, many black students don’t feel that they have a place or a home away from home on campus that a Greek family could provide. Black females only have one option if they decide to join an NPHC organization and black males have none.
The culture surrounding how members are selected also plays a role in why there are limited options for black students in Greek life. For white Greek organizations, there is a formal recruitment. Potential new members must visit each fraternity or sorority house over the course of about four to five days. The entire process is a numbers game. There is voting, ranking, and at the end there is a chance that a person will receive a bid (an invitation to join) from an organization that they either wanted to join or did not want to join.
For Divine Nine organizations, the process is completely different. You do not get to visit each house, in fact it is frowned upon if you appear to be undecided as to which organization you would like to join. The process of recruiting is strict and can take anywhere from one to three months. Apart from the very different new member process and the lack of options on Stetson’s campus, actually getting the organizations to show interest in establishing a chapter at Stetson has not been easy.
Ryan Manning, the Assistant Director for Fraternity and Sorority Involvement has shed some light on the task of adding more black Greek organizations on campus.
“We have open expansion for NPHC organizations at Stetson” which means that the school is currently open to accepting black Greeks on campus. However, there is a lot that goes into it. “[The black Greeks] want to see sustainability.”
They want to know that a chapter will last and thrive at Stetson. In order for a graduate chapter to even go forward with starting a line, there must be interest shown by the Stetson students themselves and according to Manning, the “graduate chapters aren’t connected to the students.”
While Manning has said that Stetson is trying to work with the Black Student Association, the Caribbean Student Association, and the Multi-Cultural Student Association, in order to plan events that can help foster relationship between Stetson students and graduate chapters, it is still a slow moving process and the exact date as to when a new black Greek organization will establish a chapter on campus is still not known.
With Stetson being a predominately white institution, there are constant conversations about how to diversify the campus community and what that even means. While there are events, movies, classes, and surveys that try to tackle the issue that Stetson must face, coming from myself, a black female who is currently a member of a white sorority on campus, there has not been much outward change since freshman year. Hopefully within the upcoming years, Stetson will manage to solidify connections and establish more black Greek chapters on campus. If not, they will continue to struggle with retention rates and overall satisfaction of their black students.
