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357 Acknowledgments Of the various books we, the editors of this volume, have written and edited , this one filled us with the most angst. We are both deeply committed to and active in our beloved fraternity—Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. As such, on the one hand, we wanted to be accurate and fair and guard the fraternity’s actual “secrets.” Even more, we wanted to do no actual harm to the fraternity. On the other hand, we wanted this book to push beyond the bounds of what would be “safe” to a place where the fraternity and our brothers would have to do some soul-searching. In the end, our goal is to make the House of Alpha the best it can be and for it to live up to the high ideals present at its founding. We are grateful, first and foremost, to our brothers who contributed to this volume, particularly those who stuck it out and saw the process through to its completion. Those brothers are Kelso Anderson, Felix L. Armfield, Y. Sekou Bermiss, Kenneth I. Clarke Sr., Terrence L. Frazier, Jeremy M. Harp, Oscar Holmes IV, Derrick Jenkins, Ralph E. Johnson, André M. McKenzie, Michael J. Myers II, Rashawn Ray, Richard J. Reddick, Kevin Walter Spragling, and Robert E. Weems Jr. Many of these brothers traveled at their own expense to do the most thorough research possible, made personal and family sacrifices to do this work, and made significant changes or additions to their chapters at the request of readers or to accommodate the fact that other authors left the project prematurely. Indeed, this was a labor of love for the brothers who contributed to this volume, and we appreciate their balance of passion and objectivity. Thank you to Crystal Chambers, Marybeth Gasman, Joanna S. Hunter, and Mary Beth Walpole for lending their time and talents, sometimes on lastminute notice and under considerable pressure, to this project. Their unbiased insights made this book that much stronger. To our research assistants—Paul Derohannesian, Soror Brittany-Rae Gregory, Kattie M. Smith, and Brother Dorsey Spencer—we owe a huge debt of gratitude. So much of their effort went into this book and helped make it the work it is. To Brother Willard Hall, a towering figure in the history of the fraternity, thank you for the insights and materials. His insights helped reduce much of the angst we felt in the latter stages of this book. And a lot of this work could 358 Acknowledgments not have been completed if Brother William D. Lyle had not graciously given the contributing authors access to the public documents of the fraternity. On a personal note, we would like to thank several people. We are grateful to Brother Malik Simmonds for his early suggestion that although the book might be a bitter pill for Alphas to swallow, if the fraternity can embrace what the book reveals, Alpha will be much better in the long run. Of course, in typical Brother Simmonds fashion, he did note that he hopes we “do not intend to run for national office within the fraternity anytime soon.” We would also like to thank Brothers Keener A. Tippin Sr. and John Hope Franklin, who have passed into the Omega chapter, for inspiring us and modeling the true spirit of brotherhood. Thank you also to our families and friends, who may not be members of the fraternity but understand our mission. We thank the good people at the University Press of Kentucky for their continued support of research on black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs). Publishing yet another book on the topic was a risk, and we appreciate their faith in us. To our acquisitions editor, Anne Dean Watkins, we appreciate her dedication and expeditiousness when it came to this project. To Steve Wrinn, director of the Press, we appreciate his willingness to take a chance on this book. To all the other staff, we are grateful for their hard work and dedication in bringing this project to fruition. Finally, thank you to the readers. We especially appreciate our Alpha brothers who will pick this book up, read it, analyze it on its own merits, and use it to make the fraternity better. We realize that any critique of something one holds dear may be challenging. Like Brother Charles H. Wesley once noted, it took a “small group of thinkers” to ultimately leaven the whole fraternity; we certainly count our open-minded brothers in that number in the modern...

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