A Basic Motif In Alpha Phi Alpha History . . . An Interpretation by Bro. Charles H. Wesley *An address at the Banquet of the MidWestern Regional] Central State College, April 21, 1962. Arnold J. Toynbee in his "A Study of History" devotes several pages to the challenges of history and then uses this significant sentence, "All progress comes through challenge and response." Here h e ' projects an action which is followed by a reaction. The action is a challenge and the response is a r e action. These have occurred at n u m erous periods of history in which p r o gressive movements have taken place. In this connection, Alpha Phi Alpha has had several mitifs which have characterized our continuing life. These motifs have lived and continued to b e of value. A motif is an aspect of literature, music and the fine arts and organizational life. The motif is a theme, a central feature, a dominant element or the motivating idea of a composition, or a work or a decorative artistic production. Alpha Phi Alpha has had such a major motif over the years of its history. It has been a prompting stimulus to every initiate. It has been recurrent at every initiation. It has been a basic overtone in the continuing ritualistic life of the fraternity. It has continued to be first among the challenges to Alpha brothers. There have been variations in our slogans for educational campaigns and the themes of our conventions. We search, with each new convention, for an appropriate word or words to describe our purpose and objective. In one respect, we have not departed from our original motif, even in this period of integration. This idea has not been different from that which has characterized other fraternities. Alpha Epsilon Pi, a J e w ish fraternity founded in 1914, has as its motif, a brotherhood of Jewish students who are encouraged to take high rank in scholarship. Sigma Delta Pi is for Spanish students, Lambda Phi for Italians and others have similar r e ligious motifs in their backgrounds. Among the motifs which have challenged Alpha Phi Alpha is the reference in the Ritual to Africa as Ethiopia, which constitutes a relationship to Africa and the darker peoples. The first Ritual was worked out by a committee composed of Brothers George B. Kelley
FEBRUARY, 1963
and Robert H. Ogle in 1906. However, in the next year, 1907, the Ritual could not be located and Brothers Callis and E. K. Jones rewrote a Ritual. Brother Roscoe C. Giles was requested in the same period to engage in historical r e search on the background of Ethiopia, which was then very generally known as the only area in Africa, except Egypt, which had a history. While our Rituals have been the r e sult of continuous revisions at subsequent conventions, there has been one theme which has been running continuously through them from the very first. This theme centers on Ethiopia as the known representation of Africa. The Greek use of the word Ethiopia was a part of this process. A change was made during the forties as so to include not only the narrow provincial concept of the fraternity but also to expand it into a fraternity whose portals would be open to the fellowship of all mankind". We belong to a people "who are among the oldest inhabitants of the earth, the fathers of civilization and religious culture." Alpha men have been thus encouraged to believe that though living in America and giving our allegiance and loyalty to it, we are also aware that we are the heirs of great tradition centering in Africa. Africa was not only regarded in the symbolic way, to which reference has been made, but there were Africans who were early members of the Fraternity. A Brother Mahlengen was taken into Delta Chapter, Toronto, Canada and went back to South Africa to render service to his people. When the Seventh Convention met in Chicago in 1914, he was mentioned and copies of the Sphinx with greetings were sent to him. At the 10th Annual Convention in Philadelphia in 1917, the Ritual Committee recommended that each chapter should appoint some member who was qualified to prosecute research in the early development of African civilization. Emphasis was placed in the Sphinx on Negro history with special reference to ancient Africa. Each chapter was advised to appoint a chapter historian who could undertake this work. Survey articles appeared in the Sph'nx upon ancient Africa, several of them being written by Brother William Leo Hansberry of Howard University
and others. At the 15th Annual Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1922, a letter was read from Brother R. Ridley of Xi Chapter at Wilberforce. Brother Ridley had been sent by the African Methodist Episcopal Church to Liberia in West Africa and there he proposed to establish a chapter. This proposal was greeted with considerable enthusiasm by the members of the convention. When it was known that there were three Apha men who were located there at an earlier period, the Sphinx had declared proudly, "It was because of the exemplary lives they had lived there that other men in Liberia, many of whom graduated from the best schools of Europe, desired to have a chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha in the Black Republic. It is true. Alpha is going to help. There will be a chapter in Africa" This promise was finally attained. No person has shown more direct interest in his writings than Brother W. E. B. DuBois. From the time when at Harvard he wrote the Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States, he has maintained a continuous interest. This book was published while he was on the faculty at Wilberforce University in 1896, and from this moment to his present residence in the Republic of Ghana, the interest of this Alpha man in Africa has been continuous. He was the sponsor of plans to bring the people of darker color who were called Negroes into closer relationship. He inaugurated the first Pan African Congress held in Paris in 1919. He called a second Pan African Congress in 1921 and a third Congress in 1927, and these Congresses were followed by three others. Another Negro historian, Carter G. Woodson, had stated in his volume p u b lished in 1923 "Miseducation of the Negro" the cause for the neglectful attitude toward Africa that "the educated Negroes have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools, Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and despise the African." On another occasion Woodson wrote, so far as Africa was concerned, "Negroes in their uninformed state have not been interested." However, Woodson brought out subsequently two volumes under the titles, "The African Background Outlined", and "African Heroes and Heroines." Over forty years ago, T. Lothrop Stoddard wrote a book entitled "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy". Among the ref(Continued on page 4)
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