“First of All”: The Founding of Alpha Phi Alpha and the Search for Fraternal Space at Cornell University, 1905–1920

ABSTRACT:American Greek letter intercollegiate fraternities established a highly visible physical presence on the Cornell University campus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their large fraternity residences. Following the policies of their national organizations, these fraternities did not permit African American students to become members, preventing them from participating in a common form of student social engagement with their white peers. This racial discrimination points to the differences in the white and black student experience of the campus landscape at a majority white institution with a strongly embedded fraternity culture. Faced with this situation, several African American students at Cornell came together in 1906 to found Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black Greek letter intercollegiate fraternity in the United States. Although the Cornell Alpha Phi Alpha brothers did not build their own fraternity house on or near campus, they found success by creating and establishing off-campus spaces for their fraternity activities within Ithaca. Mapping and locating their meeting and event locations during their formative years from 1905 to 1920 reveals how the students dynamically resisted the overt exclusion they faced by shaping their own social, organizational, and spatial activity. In contrast to the white fraternities at Cornell, the use of fraternal space by the Alpha Phi Alpha members ultimately operated at a more intimate and private scale, with meetings and events taking place in their own rented rooms and the homes of African American community members. The study of Alpha Phi Alpha’s early history and its search for fraternal space at Cornell expands our understanding of American fraternity culture’s development in early twentieth-century campus landscapes and their environs.