SPECIAL
CENTENNIAL ISSUE
BY JOSHUA HARRIS
REMEMBERING RAYMOND W. CANNON
Mu Chapter and Gamma Xi Lambda Chapters Establish Scholarship in Cannon’s Honor
W
hen influential white men such as Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina toured universities speaking on the inferiority of the Negro, it was a rough time for the recently free Negro across America. There was a goal to place blacks at the bottom of the totem pole and keep them there. “They were vilifying, maligning and defaming the Negro, and those sentiments permeated to institutions of higher learning,” explained Brother Raymond W. Cannon in a 1985 interview. “The conditions over the United States at the time were discouraging.” In 1911, on the campus of University of Minnesota (U-Minn), then-college sophomore Cannon received a postcard in the mail. The postcard read, “Come out and meet the fellas. Have a good time and be persuaded.” This postcard was an invitation for the male Negro students on campus to join the social club that would become Pi Alpha Tau Social Club.
44
Cannon went to that meeting and became a member of the club. The following school year, shortly after a long winter on the campus of U-Minn, a group of 10 students from Pi Alpha Tau Social Club gathered for a private meeting. Brother C.C. Middleton, a medical student from the University of Michigan, and member of Epsilon Chapter oversaw the initiation of 20-year-old Cannon and nine other charter members of Mu Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, who were initiated on April 12, 1912. Cannon’s willingness to impact change in the country is what drove him to join the ranks of Alpha Phi Alpha. Considered the “Grandfather of Alpha History,” Cannon, at the age of 22 in 1914, went on to become the first-ever editor of The Sphinx magazine. Ambitious to get involved, when approached at the sixth General Convention by then-General President Charles H. Garvin who said, “We need a journal,” Cannon agreed. Garvin handed Cannon a copy of the Hampton THE SPHINX