In Search of Sisterhood
Chapter One
World Of The Founders
On a sweltering August 2 in 1981, ten thousand members of Delta Sigma Theta sorority marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. The women, all wearing white, and many of them carrying parasols to fend off the sun, were commemorating--at this, their thirty-sixth national convention--Delta's first public act as a sorority. On March 13, 1913, just two months after their inception, the Deltas had participated in the historic woman suffrage parade on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.
Two members of the Black sorority who participated in the commemoration march remembered the suffrage parade that had taken place sixty-eight years before: Sadie T. M. Alexander, then eighty-three years of age, and Bertha Pitts Campbell, who was ninety-two. In 1913, Alexander was preparing to enter the University of Pennsylvania, from which, in 1921, she would become the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. degree.* While an undergraduate, Alexander was elected the first national president of Delta Sigma Theta, guiding its transition from a loose federation of c ... read full excerpt from: In Search of Sisterhood ebook
