"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt, Summersell Lecture Series

Wayne Flynt was born in Mississippi and lived there ever so briefly, but he grew up primarily in Alabama. He graduated from Anniston High School, attended with the intention of joining the ministry, but he turned away from both the ministry and from the state of Alabama in light of the ferocious resistance of those struggling for racial justice found here in the 1960s. So he left Alabama, attended graduate school at Florida State, took a PhD in history, and then, to our eternal benefit, he determined to return to Alabama, where he accepted a teaching position at Samford University in 1965. He taught there for 12 years before leaving in 1977 to become chair of the history department at Auburn University. [laughter] Doesn’t it just sort of stick in your throat just saying it? He remained there until his retirement as a distinguished university professor in 2005.

Now, Professor Flynt’s scholarship over his long career has been prolific, remarkable, and immensely important. He has published nearly 100 articles and book chapters. For those of us who write articles and book chapters, that’s kind of jaw dropping. He has authored or coauthored roughly a dozen books, several of which you see out here and are available for sale and signing after the talk. Most of those books center on faith, the less fortunate, politics, and especially on the state of Alabama, for which his deep affection is evident in his writing. His work has justly been recognized over and over again.

Much of this introduction is going to involve my recounting the prizes, awards, and recognitions Professor Flynt has received, which is why it might take me a while. Two of his books were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The book for which he is perhaps best known, Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites, won the Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction from the Southern Regional Council. Three different times his books have won the James Sulzbey Award from the Alabama Historical Association for the best book on Alabama history. Twice he has won the Alabama Library Association Prize for the best book of nonfiction. Three times he has received the James McMillan Prize from the Press for the best manuscript about Alabama. In 2003 he was elected president of the Southern Historical Association, which is the leading professional organization for the study of the American South.

Professor Flynt’s deeply committed scholarship has been matched by a deep commitment to teaching. During his teaching career, he taught more than 6,000 undergraduates, directed more than 40 masters theses and nearly 30 doctoral dissertations. He won nearly 20 teaching awards during the course of his career, including the award for best professor at both Samford and Auburn. Auburn history graduate students named him their top professor three different times. In 1991, he was chosen as Alabama’s Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

But, Professor Flynt has always been much more than a scholar and a teacher, although those are valuable in and of themselves. His dedication to numerous communities and to the people of the state as a whole has been evident ever since he organized a tutoring program at Rosedale High School and a voter registration drive among African Americans in Homewood during his earliest years working at Samford. Over the course of many decades, his public service has included being the founder of the Alabama Poverty Project, of sowing seeds of hope in Perry County. He served for a decade on the American Cancer Society’s committee for the socioeconomically

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell disadvantaged, sat on the boards of Voices for Alabama’s Children, the A+ Education Reform Coalition, Alabama Citizen’s for Constitutional Reform, and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy for eradicating poverty in the South. Oh, and in 1993, he worked as the court facilitator in Alabama’s lawsuit for equity funding in public education.

Given such an extensive record of public involvement, it will come as no surprise that he has been recognized over and over again for his activism, as well. Just a selection of his other awards, and remarkably, I assure you that this is just a selection, include the Hugo Black Award for service to Alabama and nation, a child advocacy award from the Alabama chapter of American Academy of Pediatrics, the Bailey Thompson Awards for Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform, the Judson Rice Award presented to a Baptist leader who has demonstrated both leadership skills and integrity, induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor and an honorary doctorate from Samford University.

Professor Flynt’s most recent book (although he tells me there’s another one in the works) is a memoir entitled Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives. I encourage really everyone to pick it up and read it. It’s partly the story of a life, partially an insider’s tale of some tumultuous years at Auburn, partially a series of reflections on religion, civil rights, education, poverty, history, and other subjects that have been close to Professor Flynt’s heart. It’s beautifully written. It amply demonstrates that it is not unusual to see Professor Flynt referred to as “the conscience of Alabama.” Now, I would venture that a conscience is something that this state has always needed, continues to need desperately, and while it seems to me that that title is likely as much a burden as it is an honor, that Professor Flynt sees it as such. It’s a burden he bears with great humility and with grace. Please join me in welcoming Wayne Flynt.

PROFESSOR FLYNT. Thank you, Josh. It’s worth noting that I received a number of major awards from The University of Alabama and none from Auburn. I don’t know what that says, those who know you best. Thanks also, Josh, I suppose, for inviting me to speak on the subject “Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, and Rejection,” though I do wonder a guy like me is speaking in a place like this on a subject like that. I’m not teaching in the classroom, though I teach a Sunday school class every week with a hundred people in it. I’m going to do some of the same things I do with them. Unfortunately, I cannot give them an exam at the end, and after nine years, I really crave an exam at the end, so there’s going to be an exam at the end of this reading. The reading is pretty transparent, but I don’t know the answer to the questions I’m going to ask you—something that a professor should never do unless he/she uses the Socratic method, in which case the questions are entirely appropriate.

The reading is from Charles Shields’s biography of . Think September 1945, Tuscaloosa, your campus, thousands an army of young men descend on the campus, war over in August, GI bill, here they come. Sorority girls are thinking they’ll not only get a baccalaureate degree but an MRS. There’s no way you can miss with the ratio of men to women on the campus. With a see of men inundating the UA campus, coeds hoped to gain their “MRS degree” before graduation. The student newspaper, the Crimson White, added luster to their fantasies by featuring a “Bama Belle” on the front page almost every week—lovely as a Hollywood starlet. Nelle was

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell apparently uninterested in any of this, which affronted the young women in the fifteen houses along Sorority Row. Her lack of makeup, her flyaway hair, and dun-colored outfits would have passed unnoticed had shed been an “independent”—someone outside the elite PanHellenic organization of sororities and fraternities. But she wasn’t. Through an error of judgment on the part of the girls of the Chi Omega house, she had become one of them—a sorority sister.

They were outstandingly pretty, the girls who were taking her in. Chi Omega was a house that “specialized in blondes,” proclaimed the university yearbook, “long, short, thin and broad”— apparently it didn’t make any difference, size, if you were a blonde—including Miss Alabama of 1946. “Your sisters were watching you,” said Chi O member Polly Terry. “The did not want your behavior to reflect on them.” But Nelle’s did. In the purely feminine aquifer of sorority life, she floated like a drop of motor oil. “I kind of wondered at the time what she saw in a sorority to join it,” marveled Mary Anne Berryman, looking back.

Regardless, with an optimistic heart, Nelle put her name on the PanHellenic Association’s list of young women scheduled to visit all the houses on Sorority Row during Rush Week in the autumn of 1945. As she and other rushees came through the door of Chi Omega, the members serenaded them lustily with fraternity and drinking songs. Nelle liked the humor. They invited her back. And a few days later, much to Nelle’s surprise (and later theirs), the Chi Omegas, founded in 1922, accepted her.

That’s not the end of the story.

As Nelle’s sorority sisters tried to get to know her better, they were at a loss to categorize her. She seemed so unlike the young women of her age. She was still chain smoking, and she preferred men’s pajamas to frilly gowns. She was a little mannish-looking, recalled Jane Benton-Davis. When girls had long hair and did things with it, her hair was short, and as Mary Anne Berryman chose to call it, “matronly, a little bit thick in the middle, nothing very stylish.” However, “She had large, beautiful dark brown eyes that were piercing.”

In the evenings, the girls chatted about their days and their beaus, but Nelle didn’t. “She was just sort of a loner. She just sat there and looked. I don’t remember any contact between her and anybody,” said Berryman. At mealtimes, “she never entered into any conversations with the girls at the table, but was more of an observer. I always had the feeling that she found us very shallow, silly, and young, in which case she was absolutely right.” Most of the girls incorrectly assumed that Nelle was a graduate student. She could be amiable and funny, too, remembered Polly Terry, “but she was not going to bounce up to somebody and go, ‘Hiya, I’m Nail!’” Once, said Terry, “I got fearfully blistered from lying too long in the sun on the roof of the sorority house. I was so blistered and sitting cross-legged on a metal card table in the upstairs lounge, and Nelle drew a caricature of me as Mahatma Gandhi. The girls were very impressed!”

On Friday and Saturday nights, when the other Chi Omegas were bustling around, trying to be ready in time for dates and dances, Nelle never had any plans. No one recalled seeing her with a beau. Practically every other weekend, she tromped through the living room, golf bag slung over her shoulder, heading out for a few rounds. The way she dressed for eighteen holes raised

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell eyebrows—just jeans and a sweatshirt. “That wasn’t the way we dressed,” said Jane Benton Davis. The pronouncement on Nelle’s outerwear was “very different.”

Out of all the girls in the house, Nelle had only one good friend: a girl she had grown up with in Monroeville. She did have some coating, but never that Teflon coating of prettiness and enviable behavior to deflect criticism. “I’m ashamed to admit that we made fun of her,” said Barbara Moore, a member of Phi Mu sorority. “Never around her, always behind her back. Today we would call her a campus nerd.”

After a year in the Chi Omega house, Nelle moved out into New Hall, one of the female dormitories. She continued to take her meals at the house sometimes and attended chapter meetings, but her sorority sisters thought she seemed preoccupied. The reasons was she had discovered another, more suitable group of companions—the avowed pundits of campus life and its traditions and, most important, the serious writers. She called them “the most casual colony” at the university, and they greeted her as one of their own. They were “the various editors, feature writers, proofreaders and kibitzers who sling together” the University of Alabama campus publications.

Two questions: Why did she join, and why did she leave? That is not a philosophical question. I really want your response, and I’d love the undergraduates particularly so y’all old folks be quiet. Young people, why do you think she joined?

STUDENT. It’s largely a requirement here. If you’re not Greek, your success at The University of Alabama is . . .

FLYNT. Okay, the response was because she had to. It’s expected of you. If you’re a woman at The University of Alabama, and I guess a man too, is that right or just the girls?

STUDENT. Both.

FLYNT. Okay, both. When students don’t respond, I always walk right up in their face. [Laughter]

STUDENT. Perhaps because she wanted to be a writer, she wanted to have many experiences of the difference facets so she could engage more.

FLYNT. Right. She wanted different experiences. She knew who she was, but she didn’t know who they were. So she came here and she joined, not because she wanted to be in a sorority but because she was interested in people, and when she decided that the sorority was boring, she went to the writers. She was trying it out.

STUDENT. She joined because her mama would have died if she hadn’t.

FLYNT. Her mom went to the University of Montevallo. Her mom was somebody in Monroeville. Her dad was somebody in Monroeville. She had gone to Huntington and didn’t fit. She was a misfit. She smoked. She cussed like a sailor. She refused to wear dresses. She wore

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell

Bermuda shorts. She didn’t belong. She didn’t belong in the Chi Omegas either, obviously, but she did belong in the writers group. She was enormously happy in the writers group. She was negotiating life and her place, like probably a fair number of you are negotiating. Probably, if you’re like Auburn students, the University is large enough and complex enough that you can find a place, if not in the Chi Omegas, in one of the four Jewish fraternities that were here in the 1960s, which I think is now down to one, which raises some kind of interesting questions about why Jewish students no longer have four fraternities, only one. Does that mean there’s an exclusion of Jews, or does that mean that there’s inclusion of them so much that they fit nicely in the gentile places because nobody’s religious at Alabama anyway? I’m just using the stereotype. [Laughter]

Okay, now. For the next 35 minutes, I’m going to read this manuscript because, number one, I don’t want to be misquoted and, number two, I want to be done with this before suppertime begins, when all of the undergraduates will walk out anyway.

Conflict of interest statement: I am from Auburn. I was not in a fraternity at Samford University, my alma mater, at Howard College. Neither were my sons at Auburn or Samford. Neither was my wife. Neither were my two brilliant daughter-in-laws, both from Birmingham. Neither was in a sorority. My mother was not in a sorority. My dad was the most anti-fraternity person ever known, but since he was a sharecropper who never graduated from high school, he never had many offers anyway. He advised me not to accept a scholarship to The University of Alabama, warning, “It’s just a damn society school where you will never be accepted.” Actually, that’s not correct. If Carl Elliot, who was poorer than our family though sharecroppers we were, could be accepted, I’m sure I could have made it too. But I was frankly not interested in the social life of a college anyway, nor did my family have any money for frills like a fraternity, nor did I have any money at all. Besides that, I had two goals in life: graduate as quickly as possible and get on with your life. Fraternities were just in the way of all that.

My Anniston High School debate partner and future Senator Don Stewart did think about it carefully and became a major beneficiary of “the Machine”—that vague presence which lots of people at The University of Alabama deny exists, but which everyone else in the state knows it does exist. I know that some newcomers in the audience don’t have an opinion one way or the other about Greek social organizations or the Machine, though probably more do after the recent elections for the Board of Education than did before that, followed by lots of really bad national attention about The University of Alabama Greek system. No, you don’t think it happened, but I got the clippings, which I’d be glad to share with you later on. It did happen.

There had been racial incidents in your Greek row, but no more than at Auburn, a story I will get to in a minute. Whether at Auburn or Alabama, these play into a very much larger and negative narrative: George Wallace, massive resistance, racism, extreme political conservatism, and resistance. To be fair though, nothing has occurred in the state of Alabama to match an alleged fraternity guidebook on successful rape written by a brother for his northeastern U.S. university fraternity. Nevertheless, lots of bad things have happened here and nationally in mainstream sororities and fraternities. Witness Sigma Alpha Epsilon, a national fraternity founded at The

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell

University of Alabama, eliminating pledge and initiation hazing after ten deaths from alcohol and drug abuse at chapter-sponsored events nationally.

Of course, I’m a historian of Alabama, and no serious historian of Alabama can ignore the Tuscaloosa presence, which does not exist: the connection between Alabama politics and the Greek system at The University of Alabama. This organization, which does not exist, was founded by Mark Ray Clement, a country physician’s son from Arkansas whose older brother Charles “Big Foots” Clement captained the 1930 Alabama Rose Bowl team and helped to recruit another player for the ’34 Rose Bowl team, who you may know something about, Bear Bryant.

Whereas Big Foots committed his soul and life to Alabama football, “Little Foot” committed himself to campus politics. Mark Ray was a political science, later a law school student, who began writing down in his law books the names of well-connected University of Alabama politically aspiring students. Over time, he linked them to the most prominent fraternities when they arrived here—Kappa Alpha, Pi Kappa Alpha, Phi Gamma Delta, Pi Kappa Phi, in particular. Moving beyond the Greek realm, he connected to some promising poor kids from sharecropper families like Carl Elliot who actually spent his first day in T-town sleeping under a truck in a driving rainstorm because he had nowhere else to sleep. Whether they were like Carl Elliot or whether they came from families like his own, Clement reached out to the whole campus. To Carl Elliot and the people like him, who lived on poverty ridge, to the women’s dormitory Nelle chose to live in, Clement paid attention to all of them allied himself to them politically. He taught them if they were serious about obtaining power and influence, then they had to do what my debate partner Don Stewart and I both did in our respective freshman years at Howard College and The University of Alabama in September of 1958.

My course at a small Baptist college, where I was a ministerial student, just beginning a strong Greek system as a result of post-WWII prosperity, which allowed our parents to spring for the money so we could become Greeks. My course was very different tactically from Don’s. I was a campus leader like Don. I was an SGA officer all three years on the campus, like Don. But I was a student far more interested in high grades and graduating early than fraternity life. I graduated high school Friday night and entered college on Monday morning, and 35 months later graduated from college. I ran for SGA president in my second year at Samford, which was my junior year, something so implausible at The University of Alabama that it would be a joke. A handsome and popular Sigma Nu would have beaten me like a drum had he remained in the race. He charmed the brothers and the sisters, all of whom fell in love with him, while I campaigned for the campus vote and among Baptist Student Union members, fellow debaters, ministerial students, and nerds, among other kinds of social misfits. Fortunately, my opponent withdrew before the election, too late for anyone else to qualify, so I won by luck and default. Fraternity life at Howard College in 1958.

Don Stewart, my debate partner, won by vision, planning, strategy, and organization. He joined the proper powerful fraternity, well known for its campus connections. He was elected president of his fraternity. He went to law school. He became SGA president. He practiced law, and then he became a United States senator. So much for the organization that doesn’t exist.

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell

Thanks to the system Clements created in the early 1930s, the UA fraternity system and law school produce generation after generation of Alabama political, economic, and social leaders. Nor, in my opinion, is this a bad thing. The presence that did not exist helped elect Carl Elliot, Ken Roberts, Bob Jones, U.S. Senators Lister Hill, John Sparkman, and Don Stewart.

One reporter for New Republic magazine pronounced the product of Clement’s machine “the finest, best, most professional delegation representing the South from the 1930s through the 1960s.”

Virginia Hamilton, PhD. graduate of the history department at The University of Alabama, in her biography of Lister Hill, notes that Clement was his chief advisor when he ran for and won the senate race in 1938, and that Clement never lost a political race that he chaired in his entire lifetime.

He also mentored state, political, and business leaders such as Aubrey Dominic, Billy Partlow, George Lemonstry, Jim Smith, Young Boozer, and for you older people in the audience, that’s a who’s who of Alabama politics a century earlier. Clement was smart enough to know also that the system must cultivate not only politicians but opinion makers and funders, so there were journalists such as Carol Kilpatrick and Beech added to the edges of the machine.

If the only issue, in fact, with Greek social organizations, their reliance to the machine, and their effect on Alabama political culture, I could make a case today for its positive influence. Compare Clement’s candidates to the vacuous drivel that pass for political discourse in the recently completed 2014 primary season, and one can become positively euphoric about the machine in times past. But I imagine the presence that did not exist never really ceased to exist. I think it morphed in the face of the Civil Rights Movement and the arrival in Tuscaloosa of lots of smart, young Yankees who did not know they were liberal until they had arrived at the Capstone. These vermin just keep coming. They keep winning scholarships at the University, and then they join sororities and fraternities before they can be properly vetted by their alumni sponsors. Recent times are producing lots more bright, native-born Alabamians who are pulled in opposite directions by their moral compasses and their social inclinations.

My first point, then, is the simple and obvious one: people join Greek organizations for lots of different reasons. Who knows why Nelle joined? I know why Clement and Don Stewart joined. Let’s just travel back in time, not to the organizations but the “why?” of it all, which I argue is more theological, sociological, and psychological than it is anything else and all woven into the personal stories that I just told you. At the core of the human condition, theologically, is the learning to be a part of a community. For belonging somewhere to somebody, to being accepted, for living among and communicating with other people like ourselves. Indeed, loneliness, isolation, alienation, rejection are major sources, as everyone in the room knows, of clinical depression. One of the greatest risks of vulnerability that a human being can have is when he or she reaches out to another person or to a group aware that they can accept you or reject you, and there are consequences both ways. In fact, I think I might say that the consequences for those who reject may be greater than for those who are rejected. Think of all the Chi Omegas who could have been best friends with the woman whose book sales in the last century are exceeded only by

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell the Bible and two more books. She was here. She was available. It didn’t happen. Many times, our acts of rejection of the other have more negative consequences on us than the other. I can guarantee you that Nelle spends no sleepless nights in Monroeville wondering whatever happened to her Chi Omega sisters, but you see, other people do lose sleep over it. And that’s the problem.

Here’s a literary sampler: Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago, who puts these words in the minds of a young Jewish revolutionary in Moscow in the first days of the Soviet revolution, Misha Gordin: “For as long as he could remember, he could never cease to wonder why someone with arms and legs like everyone else should be so different, liked by few, moreover loved by no one.” When I read that passage from Zhivago in June of 1958, with only one other person living on my hall that summer and knowing not a single person at my college, I thought it the saddest line in all of literature. That is until I was a young assistant professor and civil rights activist in Birmingham in the 1960s, and preparing a course on the 1920s, I read a poem by Countee Cullen, an African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance:

Once in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me.

I was nine and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he stuck out His tongue, and said, 'Nigger.'

Of all the things that happened there That's all that I remember.

If I correctly deconstructed Cullen’s poem, who can say which 9 year old suffered more damage from one’s desire to be accepted and the other’s desire to reject? During the 1960s, theologians, philosophers, writers, poets raised this issue to the highest level of philosophical discourse. They even gave it a name: existential alienation.

No one treated it more seriously than French novelist Albert Camus in The Stranger. His story describes Meursalt, an Algerian citizen of France living in North Africa, a man adrift, Mediterranean heritage who did not choose to define himself by that calculation. In a fit of anger at his confused identity, he kills an Arab. Disconnected from his mother and his lover, he had no empathy for others who had no empathy for him. In prison for murder, he simply is detached, an atheist who believes human condition absurd, who allows his indifference to cause his own execution. Camus puts these words in Meursalt’s mind: “Feeling it so much like myself, a brother almost, I felt that I had been happy. For anything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish a huge crowd of spectators at my execution and that they’d greet me with great cries of hate.” That is an extreme of rejection not unlike Pasternak’s, not unlike Countee Cullen’s, a desire to be joined and a rejection of the joining.

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell

The Bible, a long time ago, wrote about loneliness, rejection, alienation, as central to the relationship between God and God’s creation. Psalms 68: 6: “God sets the lonely in families.” And remember the prodigal son?

All of this establishes the ethical and philosophical boundaries for this conversation. You may have thought it was the Chi Omegas and Nelle. Wrong. The conversation is about being accepted over the human propensity that exists in all of us to exercise our right power and autonomy to reject each other. The fear that such a thing might happen to his son at The University of Alabama caused my father to tell me that he would financially help me however he could at Auburn or Howard College. If I went to The University of Alabama, I was on my own.

But what Dad feared about social fraternities at Alabama is no less true of churches, book clubs, garden clubs, civic clubs, hunting clubs, sports teams, or any number of other social groupings. I brought along for your benefit, but there were too many of you to share it, so I didn’t want you to have to share. It’s the Ku Klux Klan chapter at Auburn University in the Glomerata photograph, the yearbook, in 1909. Each young male in the Ku Klux Klan chapter is identified by his social fraternity. Now that may be about race. It could be about race. It could be about male identity. It could be about being a freshman and looking for a group. I’m not sure what it was. But what I do imagine is that in every social grouping there are these confused identities. For instance, in 1926 Ku Klux Klan that took over the state’s politics completely. At its core was racism, but around the edges were issues of human identity, gender, the confederate past, economic and social status, religion, shared values, southern mythology, rootless rural people living in Birmingham in an unfamiliar urban, industrial environment, political networking.

In such circumstances, every one of us, no matter how righteous we think of ourselves, encounters the need to respond to a black belt storefront church that I drive by from time-to- time. “Sinners and rejects welcome.” But for many others, the sign is not evidence of Christian inclusiveness to be desired so much as edgy egalitarianism to be avoided. The problem for many is not for many that the church is too inclusive but that it’s not exclusive enough. Many of us are just as attentive to who we exclude as we include, and that is the problem.

Inclusion and exclusion operate within two contradictory intellectual traditions: the central values of individualism and meritocracy and the equally important values of connection and networking. The first tradition emphasizes your individual accomplishment, celebrates the self-made person who overcomes all sorts of barriers. Think poverty, race, immigration, handicap, gender discrimination, lack of formal education. All of that can be overcome by what we do. It enthrones the mythology of “rags to riches” at the center of the American narrative. Meritocracy is the way you ought to think about America, the way you ought to think about yourself, the way you ought to think about your classes at The University of Alabama. Stand on your own feet. Don’t ask for help. Don’t accept if offered. Favoritism is un-American. Succeed or fail on your own merits. Your fantasy heroes: Horatio Alger and Andrew Carnegie.

But, the problem is American historians who have studied the elite of the gilded age of progressive America in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century, have discovered that Alger and Carnegie were rare exceptions, that America was basically about networking and connections, that

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell most of the people who were successful went to college, gained great wealth in the late nineteenth century were, in fact, from families with wealth, education, social status, family, exactly the kind of networks we join fraternities and sororities to create, which brings me to my second and perhaps most important American tradition: that of networking and connecting.

Now, remember, we’re choosing here. Is America about meritocracy and individualism, or is it about networking? What is most important if it’s about both? These concepts of networking and connecting are, in fact, just as integral to America’s communitarian ideal: our forebears where neighbors help each other, know each other, where they raise barns together, shuck corn together, shelled beans together, chased horses together, nursed each other when sick or in trouble. The equivalent of this in our post-agricultural world is we expect to help folks we know and like. We help people like ourselves. We help them be admitted to our colleges, our fraternities and sororities, to acquire their first job, to advance their careers, to win political office. At Auburn, we call it “the Auburn family.” I don’t know what you call it at Alabama, maybe the machine.

Although Americans celebrate meritocracy in theory, I really think, to be honest, that we have come to rely more on connection. Even middle-class and poor people, think Tammany Hall in New York City, think Boss Crump in Memphis. Even they understand that connections based on ethnic, racial, political identity and loyalty are central to the American Dream. The tension appears early in social organizations in American higher education. For instance, March 16, 1915, President Thatch of Auburn University received an inquiry from the president of Virginia Polytechnic Institute inquiring whether Auburn allowed secret fraternities. “If Auburn prohibited them,” he asked, “then how did the school enforce the prohibition, and if they are permitted, don’t they subvert campus discipline and create social distinctions?”

For whatever it’s worth, the president of Auburn in 1909 explained that fraternities had existed on campus for 25 years and created no social caste or any consequences, nor did they disrupt relationships between male fraternity members and non-fraternity members. The faculty was not so cure. They noted incidents of freshmen hazing, which the administration seemed unwilling to recognize and were incapable of eradicating. In fact, in 1909 the faculty at Auburn passed a resolution condemning fraternity hazing as degrading and detrimental to the rules and the spirit of good order. As with most faculty resolutions at Auburn, the administration ignored this one. Of course, not all faculty members agreed with the majority faculty opinion.

In fact, the very same year that Thatch wrote the president at VPI saying that everything was fine at Auburn, Dr. George Petri, PhD from Johns Hopkins, reportedly the first PhD teaching at an Alabama university, organizer and coach of Auburn’s first football and baseball teams, professor of classics teaching Greek and Latin, and founder of the history department, which four decades later I chaired, author of the Auburn creed, Auburn’s most beloved professor wrote an essay called “The Four Aims of Education.” Listen very carefully in 1916 how he defined the fourth aim of education: “University education brings us into closer touch with the world around us. This is in direct opposition to the old-fashioned idea that thought of college as a sort of monastery or nunnery. Indeed, the college boy has outrun the college professor in this and has built up in larger colleges a how system of education between the joints of the institution. His fraternity clubs, social organizations, literary, athletic, and political contests are giving him invaluable training in

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell the ways of the world, which he will seek in vain in a classroom. If we are to get in touch with the world, Petri ended his essay, we must cultivate not necessarily the habit of bumping into it but the habit of adapting to it.”

Five years later, the year before Thatch wrote his reply to the president at VPI, the mother of a prospective Auburn student wrote him that her son had been a freshman at Auburn but had withdrawn, to use Petri’s metaphor, because he had bumped into the world at Auburn. She charged that her freshman son suffered from fraternity cruelty beyond anything practiced at an American college or university. In response faculty and matronly criticism, she might be interested in the upper-class male reaction to all of this. One upper-class male apologized, tongue-in-cheek, for this “awful occupation of awaking guileless youths from their sweet, angelic slumber, parading them in nightclothes and forcing them to sing stupid and disgraceful songs. This practice needs to stop before the upperclassmen create more football players and real men.” Fellow upperclassmen added insult to injury observing that “the species of freshman rats at Auburn had recently invaded the campus who could only be controlled by hazing.”

Across the state, at the Capstone, another University of Alabama graduate with some literary aspirations, Winston Groom, remembered his apprenticeship for the Capstone’s fraternity system at UPS Military School in Mobile, where he also adapted in strange ways. The high school fraternity was socially picky and particularly vicious and subjected its rats to unmerciful paddling. He remembered one particularly sadistic torturer making all of the students pull don their trousers and sit on a 50 lb. block of ice while trying to pick up a baby green pea between their buttocks. Failure to achieve results resulted in a football player with a large paddle beating your freezing behind. When Groom wrote about this ordeal as preparation for the Alabama fraternity system, he did so without criticism as if it were a mere rite in passage to the new world. I suppose my question is why would any self-respecting human being submit to such indignity and humiliation to join anything? The answer, as you well know, is your desperation to belong to a special and inclusive group, fill in the blank.

But, if you connect to such a group, you disconnect from me, from my sons, from my daughter- in-laws, and probably from a good many people in this room. It’s just the way life is: you connect, you disconnect. Whether it’s the KKK or the Knights of Columbus or the Masons or Greeks, group identity always has an upside and always has a downside. The upside is acceptance. The downside erodes your individuality, ideas of personal merit, and your sober reflection. Identity formed by connections and networks is not the highest form of identity. The highest form of human identity, at least in my experience, is formed in the solitude of great books that expand your consciousness and challenge your assumptions. Associations with great teachers who push you to explore all verities, from families and churches most particularly, from within yourself, from some sort of moral compass that tells you when to disconnect, when your connections have veered badly off course.

The Auburn family, as much as I love it, certainly does exist by its powerful networks, not least of which my Auburn University son graduate. But I would never trust that network in preference to individual accomplishments, interior moral compass, and perhaps even the worthiness of connection to other networks just as worthy, maybe even The University of Alabama machine

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell network. Of course, I understand that you’re beginning to say, “Well, if you start with different assumptions, you reach a different conclusion.” If all people have networks, if all people desire to connect, then it’s just about how you connect. It’s not about will you; it’s just about how you. So the choice is how and why.

Writers such as Harper Lee connected to writers and journalist, so what’s so bad the Chi Omegas didn’t like her? After all, they were frivolous and superficial, and maybe she lacked the social skills to network. So doesn’t it work?

But then it can get more complicated than that. Witness my own campus, 1990s, KAs, good guys, many of them in my southern history classes, sometimes for all the wrong reasons, but good guys, not racist, not a one I knew, more into southern tradition. Maybe it was good for them, good for Alabama, good for the university, but they had the tradition of the Old South parade. I’m sure KAs don’t do it at Tuscaloosa, but they did it at Auburn. Despite increasing opposition from more and more African American students, who said, “you know, we don’t like the Old South parade in the confederate flag. It sends the wrong message in a little southern college town.” So Bill Muse, our college president, the son of a Pentecostal preacher or a biracial church in the Mississippi delta, hardly a predictable critic of all things southern, college baseball player, president of his college fraternity and then president of his national fraternity, sat down with the KAs and said, “Please don’t have the parade. If you have the parade, we’re going to have a racial incident on the Auburn campus.” Well, they determined to go on with it. Bill allowed them to, and the anachronistic gray-clad soldiers and their hooded, girded belles swooped down College Street on horses and in wagon and through a thoroughfare literally divided by race. Thousands of white students and townspeople on one side, thousands of black students and townspeople on the other side, including, I might add, a good portion of the mostly African American Auburn football team and basketball teams. Cheers and huzzahs and even imitation rebel yells from one side of the street, jeers and taunts replying from the other side of the street. Only the intervention of the Auburn police who forced the parade down an alternate street prevented a racial riot that night in the loveliest village.

The next week, President Muse invited the KA officers to the president’s conference room. Before they arrived, he purposefully was late for the meeting. The university relations director had posted around the conference room a montage of press clippings, not unlike the ones from Tuscaloosa last September, from newspapers around the country and from some abroad about the near race riot in Auburn. When he came in and they had all read the articles, his argument was simple: if Kappa Alphas really care about their fraternity image, if they really care about the Auburn family, if they really care about the reputation of Auburn University and their own futures in a global economy defined by their baccalaureate degree, they might want to rethink the public ritual that had divided our community. To their everlasting credit, they never had another KA parade.

I wish I could say that is the end of the story at Auburn, the end of Greek social insensitivity and racial polarization, but alas, it was not to be. Much later, a fraternity sorority party, decided to expose their collective rear ends globally. Not literally, of course, though I would have preferred that obscene vision to what they actually did. Some of the brothers posted a mock lynching of one

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell of the brothers cosmetically decorated in black face. It’s self-interesting in a homophobic fraternity, but I won’t go into this, surrounded by cute sorority bunnies, complete with little rabbit ears and white tails, mixing metaphors of Playboy and Birth of a Nation. The symbolism was really hard to miss on the international web. Southern manhood defending the virtue of provocative, young, white women from black want-to-be rapists. Needless to say, the posting went viral, the most compelling response coming from an African American soldier in Iraq in Operation Desert Storm, raising the obvious question: “What the hell am I doing defending democracy and freedom in Kuwait when there’s obvious work to be done in Auburn, Alabama?” Humiliation is hardly the word for what my university experienced. Although the worst of it was still to come by the letters to the editors of the Birmingham News from throughout the state defending the conduct of the fraternity boys and sorority girls as just “boys will be boys.”

Well, folks in Tuscaloosa, if you live in Alabama, and if you go to one of our universities and if you graduated from it and have it imprinted on the credentials you submit for your future life, let me introduce you to the World Wide Web. Don’t reveal things about yourself of your social organization or your university that fit perfectly into a historical narrative worldwide of racism, violence, and sexism, even if you don’t really mean it, when in fact 150 years of our state’s history has, in fact, created it.

As I prepared this presentation, in closing, I tried out these ideas on one of my three goddaughters. Their father, now deceased, was an African American from Hartselle, Alabama and a terrific athlete at Rhodes College, their mother a white, bilingual biology teacher from Ohio. Victoria, my goddaughter, a freshman at Auburn when the late unpleasantness of last September down on the Capstone occurred, she was appalled, partly because she was one of two African American women accepted in September of last year by traditional all-white Auburn sororities, the only two who sought pledging by a white sorority were both pledged. The Phi Mu sorority pulled a major cool by getting my goddaughter. She is stunningly beautiful. She is nearly six feet tall. She was a star high hurdler and poll vaulter on the Auburn High School track team. She is a faithful and beloved member of First Baptist Church, where her family is active and where her mother is a deacon. Yeah, Baptists do that sometimes; we’re a radical church. Her boyfriend’s handsome, 6’4” tall, the son of a Belgian-born professor at Auburn. She completed her first year at Auburn with a 4.0 academic average, and her question to me is: “Why does the media focus on what happened in Tuscaloosa and ignore the alternative narrative of what happened to me?” I tried to explain that journalists usually focus on conflict and rejection, which confirms stereotypes. Not uncomplicated stories of acceptance like hers but acceptance where only two African American women went out for rush. Do you realize what a terrible fact that is when you think you’re going to be rejected even before you try? At least at Alabama, they occasionally try.

One of my students, now a pilot and first officer of a charter jet company. She was a college we adopted through our church program, listened to this speech. I just wanted to try it out on a student recent to see how it went down, and I talked about everything I’ve said, inclusion, exclusion, and so forth. He grew up in a poor but proud family in a small antebellum cabin in rural St. Clair County. He grew up poor with no social skills whatsoever, no inclination to join a fraternity, no money to do it if he’d been inclined. The first time he ever had a date with a sorority girl, he had to come to my office so I could show him how to tie a tie. He wouldn’t have made it.

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"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell

So he listened carefully to the speech, and when I finished the first part of it, reciting the values and inevitability of group identity. It’s going to happen; it’s just going to happen. I explained that spoken and lived rituals of identity lead to group identity so people are going to join. The consequences are sometimes not salutary; the who process is important nonetheless. Pause. He’s just sitting there reflecting, and he says, “maybe you’re right, but group identity draws mainly from other people rather than from within yourself. It usually has a dark side. You remember when you taught in the Alabama history lectures about nativism and xenophobia, about the no-nothings and the true Americans and guardians of liberty and the KKK?” It all begins as just innocent, fraternal groupings of people looking for folks like themselves, a sense of common identity, and it all morphed into the dark underbelly of the American experience. The antidote.

One final story. Legendary, brilliant, Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer grew up in one of the most educated, connected, distinguished families in Germany. A number of his relatives were politicians prior to the rise of Hitler and they remained in those positions as indispensable professional soldiers despite their disgust for him. Many of them, including Dietrich, were implicated in Operation Valkyrie, the plot against Hitler, and were hanged weeks before in front of their concentration camp. While a student at the University of Berlin, Bonhoeffer joined a social fraternity where he became a highly esteemed member because of his family’s political and military connections, as well as for his own brilliance as a concert pianist and as a theologian. Like all the brothers, he relished the sense of identity with the upper crust of German society. All were imprinted by being selected for membership in the fraternity, which enforced their self-image as Germany’s future elite. But during his university years, more and more of his fraternity brothers were caught up in the frenzy of Hitler’s rise to power and ultimate ascendancy as chancellor. When they began to mimic Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Bonhoeffer publicly resigned from his fraternity, sighting “unchristian and deeply troubling bigotry” as the reason for his resignation.

To me, that story is the perfect, original, classical, Greek story. Individual honor developed from your family, reinforced by your philosophy, your education, and your religion, all rooted in the depths of your individual conscience, willing and even glad to identify with your university, with your fraternity, your sorority, your state, your nation when these institutions are wise and just. To join with like-minded compatriots, to sing, to drink—in moderation, it is the Greek ideal—to talk, to plan futures, to plan professions. One for all and all for one, but in the end, the mark of a real man or woman is knowing when to walk away.

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