page_title: Alpha Phi Alpha
section_title: Black college Greek movement
hierarchical_section_title: Alpha Phi Alpha / Black college Greek movement
caption_attribution_description: Delegate’s badge or pin for 23rd AKA Boule at Kansas City Municipal Auditorium
context_page_description: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated is the first historically African American intercollegiate Greek-lettered fraternity. It was initially a literary and social studies club organized in the 1905–1906 school year at Cornell University but later evolved into a fraternity with a founding date of December 4, 1906, at Cornell. It employs an icon from Ancient Egypt, the Great Sphinx of Giza, as its symbol. Its aims are "Manly Deeds, Scholarship, and Love For All Mankind," and its motto is "First of All, Servants of All, We Shall Transcend All." Its archives are preserved at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
  Chapters were chartered at Howard University and Virginia Union University in 1907. The fraternity has over 290,000 members and has been open to men of all races since 1945. Currently, there are more than 730 active chapters in the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia. It is the largest predominately African-American intercollegiate fraternity and one of the ten largest intercollegiate fraternities in the nation.
context_section_description: Blacks call themselves Greek because "Greece was a culturally diverse pluralistic society of various ethnic and racial groups—much like the United States of today. However, the citizens were mostly dark-skinned black and brown people" according to journalist and Alpha member Tony Brown.
  Alpha Phi Alpha is the first intercollegiate Greek-lettered fraternity in the United States established for people of African descent, and the paragon for the Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs) that followed. Alpha Kappa Alpha was founded in 1908 at Howard University as both the first African-American sorority and the first BGLO founded at a black college. Four other BGLOs were in quick succession founded at Howard: Omega Psi Phi (1911), Delta Sigma Theta (1913), Phi Beta Sigma (1914) and Zeta Phi Beta (1920). Kappa Alpha Psi was founded at Indiana University in 1911. Sigma Gamma Rho (1922) and Iota Phi Theta (1963) were founded at Butler University and Morgan State University, respectively.
  In 1940, Alpha Phi Alpha, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and Kappa Alpha Psi hosted conventions in the Municipal Auditorium of Kansas City, Missouri, and held a historic joint BGLO session.
caption: Alpha Phi Alpha delegate's pin from the 1940 Pan-Hellenic convention of ΑΚΑ, ΑΦΑ and ΚΑΨ
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