READ IT, SAVE IT, COPY IT, FILE IT, FORWARD IT, DISCUSS IT AND BE RENEWED IN THE SPIRIT OF THE FRATERNITY VOL. 1, NO. 5 - APRIL 21, 1999 "Finding the Good and Praising It!" Frederick Douglass: He was the True Spirit of the Fraternity. By Skip Mason "Douglass, we are here. Here to take up the task where you left off." Brother Simeon S. Booker, General President 1921. Wesley cites in the History of Alpha Phi Alpha that the fraternity had been accused of "robbing the grave for fraternity membership." Several newspapers published articles which echoed that same sentiment. Wesley gives sound reasons as to why the criticism was not justified. Permit me to add several more documented facts that are not included in the history book. By some divine foresight, Douglass had chosen the name Alpha for several business concerns that he was involved with in 1892 namely the Alpha Life Insurance Company and Alpha Bank which he co founded to promote black business just three years before his death in the Anacostia area. (A photo of Douglass and the board of directors appears in the book "Talented Tenth"). Douglass's second wife Helen Pitts, a white female suffragette had established a radical feminist newspaper called the Alpha as early as the 1860s. Finally, in the spirit of Douglass, Ida Wells Barnett, led members of an organization black activist called the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1916 to protest a myriad of issues. Certainly these are all circumstantial and may not have a direct meaning to Douglass's induction, but nonetheless, they are significant facts in understanding the relationship of God's divine nature of circumstances. Everything is relevant is life. People, places, situations, events that we experience in and through our lives all happen for a reason. Douglass understood the relevance of what would happen before Alpha Phi Alpha was born when he prophetically uttered: "I have wanted evidence of greatness, under a colored skin to meet and beat back the charge of natural, original and permanent inferiority of the colored races of men." Douglass traveled to Egypt in February of 1887. Upon arriving, he said "I do not know of what color and features the ancient Egyptians were, but the great mass of the people I have seen would be in America be classed with mulattos and Negroes." He recalled that 40 years earlier, he had found in a book Natural History of Man, the picture of a pharaoh that reminded him of his "handsome, lost mother" and now in Egypt he had a chance to see the Pharaohs people for himself." Douglass said "It has been the fashion of American writers to deny that the Egyptians were Negroes and claim that they are the same race as themselves. This has, I have no doubt, been largely due to a wish to deprive the Negro of the moral support of Ancient Greatness and to appropriate the same to the white race." From Egypt, Douglass traveled to Greece visiting Athens, the Acropolis and the great Parthenon. It can be concluded that Frederick Douglass took the physical journey to the roots of Alpha some nineteen years before the fraternity was founded. Eleven years after his death that spiritual presence revisited Callis and those six men on the "hill" at Cornell and inspired them to forge ahead with this experiment in brotherhood. Frederick Douglass was very close to the assistant to the Library of Congress Daniel Alexander Payne Murray, the father of Jewel Nathaniel Allison Murray, who began working at the Library in the 1880s. Letters of exchange between the two are in the archives of the Library of Congress and the University of Minnesota Archives. Perhaps the most significant connection between Douglass and a
"Jewel" lies within the family line of Jewel Henry Arthur Callis whose
mother Josephine Sprague was the brother of Nathan Sprague, the husband
of Rosetta Douglass, the only daughter of Frederick Douglass and his wife
Anna Murray Douglass.(no relation to Jewel Murray's family). Callis
cites that as a teenager growing up in Binghamton and Ithaca that Frederick
Douglass was his "refuge and through him he felt "a new hope was
being born." Callis had studied the writings of Frederick Dougass regarding
slavery. When Douglass died in 1895, Callis was despondent over this loss.
He later recounted in a speech that Douglass in 1848 was the only man who
possessed the courage to stand on the platform of the first Women's Suffrage
convention. He was the first! He named his bank and insurance because
they represented the first in that area for his people. He traveled
to Egypt to learn more about his race. Why then shouldn't he t be
inducted into the nation's first fraternity for college trained men of
African-American descent. |
