Kappa Alpha Psi celebrates with service

The Greek letter organization, Kappa Alpha Psi, first founded at IU, is manifesting service this week on campus.

The fraternity, an all-black organization founded in 1911, is having a variety of events this week with the theme “Thee Krimson Renaissance.”

Eric Love, an advisor for KAP, said the events will be “promoting an era of refinement and achievement” as well as awareness of the fraternity.

The fraternity will celebrate its 100th year of service in 2011. Love said events this week will span from health care and technology to entertainment and artistic expression. The entire week serves a purpose.

“The main reason is to provide service; secondary is to expose the fraternity to the rest of the campus,” Love said. “We like to promote our story or history; share information about our fraternity at IU.”

Events are each named with the beginning of the title being “Art of ... ” and are occurring every day this week at various venues.
 
All events are free and open to the public with the exception of the “Black Diamonds & Pearls” Party, which will be held on Saturday.
 
Thursday’s event, “Art of Spoken Word” will mix caffeine and passion. The night will consist of Starbucks Coffee and a performance featuring the California poet Dahlak Brathwaite. Brathwaite has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry twice and will touch on topics such as race and discrimination.

Junior Shawn Major-Winston, director of the event, said the poetry will be an interesting experience for audience members.

“We thought we’d put a little spunk to it and bring experience with somebody who has spoken word so the campus can get a feel for what spoken word truly is,” Major-Winston said.

He said spoken word can be more powerful than written word because the emotion can be easily felt and heard.

“It’s more catchy and plus you will see more emotion,” Major-Winston said.
Because there are so many different fraternities on IU’s campus, some are often unrecognized by name.

Sophomore Aaron Barnes, a newly initiated member to KAP, said in the events so far, people asked him about the KAP emblem, which lead to conversations about the original fraternity foundation.

“Education ensues,” Barnes said.

Barnes said although a major element of the week is to promote KAP, all IU students should be motivated to attend the events because everyone is of targeted interest.

“The events are put on by students like them, and that’s important because we wouldn’t want to put anything before students we wouldn’t want to see ourselves,” Barnes said. “It’s practical and applicable. We try to seek out student representatives who can relay information to our peers and give something they can tell somebody else about.”