Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities

2: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Ambiguity of Social Reform

2 Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Ambiguity of Social Reform Through the political agitation of those such as antilynching leader Ida B. Wells and the protests of organizations such as the NAACP, African Americans used a variety of tactics and approaches in the struggle to reinsert themselves into the channels of public discourse. Simultaneously, an active counterpublic was continued through organizations such as the Negro Women’s Club Movement. —Michael C. Dawson, “A Black Counterpublic?”1 In 1997, four Black Greek-letter sororities—Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Zeta Phi Beta, and Sigma Gamma Rho—joined C. Delores Tucker, the chair of the National Political Congress of Black Women, in the Black Women’s Sojourner Truth Monument Crusade. Tucker and her supporters fought to prevent a congressional resolution, which called for moving a statue of three White leaders of the women’s suffrage movement from the basement of the Capitol to the Rotunda, unless there was an addition of an image of the Black feminist, abolitionist, suffragist, and human rights advocate Sojourner Truth. On April 22, 1997, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia, introduced legislation to put the sorority women’s and other civil rights groups’ request into action. The federal government suggested a separate statue of Sojourner Truth, but Black women activists refused to compromise. 29 Tucker remarked pointedly, “Black women are sick and tired of being left out of the history of this nation.”2 The Sojourner Truth Monument Crusade is one example of the way Black American sororities act to address the absence of scholarly attention to, and public knowledge of, the participation of Black American women in public life and politics. AKA’s counterpublic-sphere efforts from 1908 through the late twentieth century mirror the activist pro-action demonstrated in the Sojourner Truth Monument Crusade. The sorority ’s work oscillates from benevolence and reform to radical political interventions, and much of AKA’s political strategizing and activism is tantamount to tangible, counterpublic-sphere work. There is a generous body of intellectual work on the conservative and radical components of counterpublics, yet for the purpose of my arguments here, I draw from the Black Public Sphere Collective’s (BPSC) theorization of Black counterpublics to define AKA’s various roles in public life. The BPSC is a critical mass of Black intellectuals who write about and hold commitments to working toward the betterment of Black people’s lives on a large-scale and grassroots level. For this insurgent group of intellectuals, Black counterpublics entail “the critical practice and visionary politics, in which [Black] intellectuals can join with the energies of the street, the school, the church, and the city to constitute and challenge the exclusionary violence of much public space in the United States.”3 Given AKA’s efforts in the Sojourner Truth Monument Crusade and their initiative in similar as well as more radical collective efforts for an entire century, the women’s activism demonstrates the BPSC’s definition of counterpublicsphere work. Counterpublic-sphere work has increased subversive possibilities to existing forms of race, gender, and sex domination in universities, where the production and maintenance of ideologies take place, and in social formations that may appear insignificant on the surface. The arguments offered here grapple with the ways AKA sorority struggles with class bias and conservative cultural politics , and how these shortcomings collide with their counterpublic efforts, explications that are absent in existing literature on Black sororities.4 I further provide a comparison between AKA 30 DISCIPLINING WOMEN and other racial-ethnic women’s social and political organizations to assert that AKA, like their Chicana, Asian American, Indigenous Nations, and White ethnic sisters, took on activist work out of necessity owing to their subordinated position as sexualized, gender, ethnic, or racial minorities. Thus what follows is a brief comparative history of AKA’s historical formation and ideological stance vis-à-vis White and racial-ethnic women’s clubs, a theoretical discussion of the contradictions and merits of their reform and counterpublic-sphere work, and political prescriptions for this and similar organizations concerned with addressing the life conditions for people of African descent. My comparative history and explication of AKA counterpublicsphere work maintains that the sorority is more than a social organization dabbling in benevolence and reform. AKA exhibits an ethnic center that draws in a significant amount of collegeeducated Black women in the name of collective support, academic excellence, and commitment to...