Author highlights past for Greek community

In a speech Tuesday night at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, Walter Kimbrough, a national expert on historically black fraternities and sororities, outlined the history of Greek organizations to see what lessons they hold for today's fraternities and sororities.\nAn audience, made up largely of both black and white Greek students, packed into the center's Grand Hall to listen to Kimbrough, the author of "Black Greek 101." With the seating full, many students had to sit on the floor.\nKimbrough said fraternal organizations first arose in the mid 1700s as a response to paternalistic university administrations keeping students under tight control -- and from their inception, these organizations included only a very select group of students. \n"They gave essays, orations and debates at this time," Kimbrough said. "They were institutional expressions of grievances and exclusion."\nOver time, these debating societies evolved into the first Greek letter organizations and took on a more social aspect. And by 1930 the idea of Greek life was set. \nKimbrough said these first fraternities and sororities created a blueprint, which emphasized character development, scholarship, fellowship, service and religion. He then drew on this blue print to provide lessons for today's Greek organizations.\n"Fraternities are supposed to support the educational objectives of the whole institution," he said.\nKimbrough contrasted the older blueprint of Greek life with today's version, which emphasizes parties, alcohol and often hazing. He said hazing first began in this country in the 1850s and involved the entire student body. \nKimbrough showed a picture of three badly-bruised freshmen from this period to illustrate the brutality of early hazing.\n"They got their behinds kicked," Kimbrough said. "That's what happened when you went through rush."\nWhen universities began cracking down on hazing in the 1920s, the tradition was kept alive within the Greek system, Kimbrough said. \nThroughout his talk, Kimbrough showed slides of fraternities. He pointed out no matter the race of the fraternity brothers, the pictures all looked the same, with men in ties lined up in an orderly fashion. Kimbrough said pop culture's image of fraternities now stems more from the movie "Animal House," than it does from Greek organization's historic ideals.\nKimbrough detailed the many problems and dangers hazing poses to today's fraternities and sororities. He told about a white sorority at DePauw University that burnt pledges with cigarettes and related the story of another pledge who died of a heart attack after watching his pledge brothers endure a beating by members of his black fraternity.\n"We're at a crisis period in American higher education with fraternities and sororities," Kimbrough said. "It seems like every year we get further and further away from the blueprint. We've got to stop bystander apathy and confront your brother and sister when they're wrong."\nJunior Jason Watters, a member of Beta Theta Pi at IU, said the message particularly resonated with his fraternity's goal of changing stereotypes about the Greek community.\nSenior Oscar Banks, a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, said he appreciated learning about the similar histories of Greek organizations.\n"If Greek organizations are going to last, we're going to have to make some changes," Banks said.\n-- Contact staff writer Daniel Wells at djwells@indiana.edu.