20-02-2025
Given our history, perhaps Black Greeks should consider name changes for their organizations
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks Nov. 6, 2024, at Howard University in Washington, D.C., after conceding the presidential race to Donald Trump. (Grace Hills/Kansas Reflector)
In a speech at the University of Minnesota in 2002, the late Randall Robinson, best known for his anti-Apartheid and reparations advocacy, said the following: 'Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote 500 years before Christ that everything Ancient Greece was: its calendar, its division of the year into 12 parts, its language, its math, its science, its gods, its mythology, its carving figures in stone, all of it … had been derived from older civilizations to the south, the civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia.'
Years before I found that speech, I met Asa Hilliard, an educational psychologist and Egyptologist, when he spoke at my church in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1976, Hilliard wrote the introduction for a much-maligned book originally published in 1954 titled 'Stolen Legacy.' The book argued that Greek Philosophy was stolen African philosophy.
Given this, and years of reading on these subjects, I've long wondered why Black fraternities and sororities, recently highlighted via the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, haven't dropped Greek letters from their names. Maybe the time has come for this discussion.
I'm not attacking Black Greek organizations. Just the opposite. Some of the most consequential people in my life belong to these organizations.
My brother is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. My late journalism professor Samuel Adams, a trailblazing Black journalist and someone I called 'Daddy Sam,' was a member of Omega Psi Phi. Betty Bayé, my colleague at the Louisville Courier-Journal, whom I still call 'Queen' and greet with a peck on her cheek, is a member of Delta Sigma Theta.
Bayé shared that while her sorority and the other 'Divine Nine' have Greek letters in their name, the practice is like everything Black people have done in our sojourn here in the West — we reshaped it and made it our own. We changed the culture.
'Some ate high on the hog and gave us the scraps,' she said. 'We took the leavings and created 'Soul Food.' The white folks gave us their version of the Bible to create docile slaves. What did we do? We gave birth to Nat Turner and Black Liberation Theology. We went into newsrooms as suspects unworthy of our jobs. What did we do? We created NABJ to encourage and honor our own.'
NABJ is the National Association of Black Journalists.
Mentor Charles F. McAfee, the famed Kansas architect and a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, sponsored my entrance into Sigma Pi Phi, a professional fraternity also known as the 'Boule,' after college. I didn't follow a traditional path into Black fraternity life (I've been inactive for years), but I have some standing in this discussion.
Black Greek Letter Organizations' emergence, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, coincided with 'the rise of Jim Crow laws, the popularity of scientific racism, and widespread racial violence.'
Today, the nine BGLOs comprise the National Panhellenic Council. Nationwide, these organizations have created community, mentored young professionals and raised scholarship money. These networks uplift entire communities.
But I've felt an incongruity with the organizations maintaining connection to the Greeks, who we know traveled to Africa to study.
As the 1990s hip-hop group, The X-Clan, said: 'I am an African, I don't wear Greek. Must I be reminded of a legendary thief who tried to make Greece in comparison to Egypt?'
This isn't disparagement. I'm invoking a common paradox for African Americans: managing the 'twoness' that W.E.B. DuBois described of people trying to inhabit a larger, hostile society while retaining a sense of self.
I'd experienced this sort of cultural awakening as a young adult.
I'd read the 'Autobiography of Malcolm X' before my junior year in college. In my dorm room, I played my mother's old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. records on a loop. Researching a term paper for my History of American Journalism class, in which we each wrote about the year of our birth, I discovered the Black Panthers and the fire-breathing H. Rap Brown.
My campus friends and I brought Malcolm X's widow Betty Shabazz and educator Jawanza Kunjufu to campus. We travelled to Kansas City Kansas to hear Yousef Ben-Jochannan, known as 'Dr. Ben.' I earned a journalism degree with an African and African-American Studies emphasis.
In Louisville, where I landed my first post-college job, I joined St. Stephen Baptist Church, still led by the Rev. Kevin W. Cosby, who guided me toward more knowledge.
St. Stephen offered an Afrocentric lifestyles ministry, where we could adopt African names. But for my father's pride in our family history, I would have taken the surname 'Makalani,' which among varied definitions means 'writer.' We had a 'Rites of Passage' program for youth that I helped lead. We named our Family Life Center after activist Fanny Lou Hamer. We flew a red, black and green flag out front.
But meeting Hilliard there left an indelible mark on Mark.
Hilliard introduced me to historian John Henrick Clarke's work. Clarke once famously said it was 'impossible to continue to oppress a consciously historical people.' My fraternity brother named his son Asa after Hilliard.
Some Black people reject the term African American. They've argued they've never been to Africa and know nothing of it. They consider themselves American, not African. Still, African Americans have increasingly embraced their African heritage. It is no longer unusual to see Jesus depicted as Black in Black churches. More Black people now wear their hair naturally or braided. They wear Ankhs and Kente cloth.
Amid this reawakening, maybe it's time to discuss this name change.
A 'Stolen Legacy' review included this passage: 'The greatest crime Europe committed against the world was the intellectual theft of Africa's heritage. Empires were stolen, whole countries snatched and named after pirates, rapists, and swindlers. Palaces and monumental edifices destroyed could be rebuilt, but when you steal a people's cultural patrimony and use it to enslave, colonize and insult them, then you've committed unforgivable acts bordering on sacrilege.'
Enslavers tortured our names, language, and culture out of us. Few of us can trace our lineage beyond the slave trade. A name change for Black Greek organizations could help with cultural reformation.
I recently ran across a 1963 radio interview with Malcolm X where the interviewer asked about his 'X.' Malcolm explained that enslavers ripped away their captives' names, replacing them with a slave master's surname connoting ownership. 'X' signifies the unknown in mathematics, so he replaced his slave name with 'X.'
Malcolm said if you saw a Japanese or Chinese person named Barney Murphy (I inserted a first name), it likely would confuse some folks. The same holds true for African Americans with names like Murphy or O'Kelly or McCormick. These names don't reflect our African origins. They typically reflect the horrors we've endured. The humiliations we suffered. The swaths of history torn away.
Why should we wear such names?
Exactly.
Mark McCormick is the inaugural executive director of the Kansas Black Leadership Council, the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum and chairman of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
