Sigma Alpha Epsilon history

By the end of 1857, the fraternity numbered seven chapters.

Its first national convention met in the summer of 1858 at Nashville, Tennessee, with four of its eight chapters in attendance.

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II, one of the first initiates at SAE’s University of Mississippi chapter — who went on to become a senator and an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court — delivered a speech at the Capitol in 1860 justifying slavery.

DeVotie lost his footing while boarding a steamer at Fort Morgan, Alabama, on February 12, 1861, hit his head and drowned.

The founding of a chapter there at the end of 1865, along with the re-establishment of the chapter at the University of Virginia, led to the fraternity's revival.

Soon, other chapters came back to life and, in 1867, the first post-war convention was held at Nashville, Tennessee, where a half-dozen revived chapters planned the fraternity's future growth.

The Fraternity’s magazine, The Record, was founded in 1880 by Major Robert H. Wildberger of Kentucky Military Institute chapter.

The first northern chapter had been established at Pennsylvania College (now Gettysburg College), in 1883, and a second was placed at Mount Union College in Ohio two years later.

By 1886, the fraternity had chartered 49 chapters, but few were active.

SAE made that clear in the 1888 issue of its magazine, The Record.

In 1891 Harry and George Bunting started a publication they called The Hustler, a secret, or at least private, magazine.

The Nebraska Lambda Pi Chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon was founded on the University of Nebraska campus on May 26, 1893, becoming just the fourth fraternity on campus.

In 1894 its name was changed to Phi Alpha, and it is a regularly issued secondary magazine of the Fraternity.

A manual of the Fraternity, edited by Doctor George H. Kress was published at Los Angeles in 1904.

The Washington Alpha chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon was founded May 30th, 1906.

In 1911 a detailed history of the Fraternity was published in three large octavo volumes with many illustrations.

In 1912, William C. Levere brought out Who’s Who in Sigma Alpha Epsilon, a series of biographical sketches of living men prominent in the Fraternity.

Today, the fraternity boasts 15,000 members at 219 chapters and 20 colonies around the nation. It took 27 years to open the first Northern chapter, because “to go to a northern college would mean to lower the standard of the fraternity by taking unworthy men,” William C. Levere, a devoted SAE member, wrote in his 1916 book A Paragraph History of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

After 1920 a Board of Trustees was created to manage the Fraternity’s endowment funds.

Our home located at 635 North 16th Street was built in 1928, and is a well-recognized fixture on fraternity row.

A “jungle party” was held by the Delta Psi fraternity in 1952.

The last years of his life he served the Fraternity as its executive secretary, capping a distinguished academic career that had included two college presidencies. It was probably John Moseley more than any other whose leadership carried Sigma Alpha Epsilon forward during the next twenty years until his untimely death in 1955.

A version of the chant was sung on January 9, 1961 – the day Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to step onto the campus after a judge's ruling.

At a campus debate about integrating white fraternities in 1963, a former UT student advocated for the desegregation of Greek organizations, Goldstone wrote.

Daniel Sheehan, a civil rights attorney, said in 1966 he had to resort to bare-knuckle parliamentary procedures to secure the first black pledge into Harvard’s SAE chapter.

By the '40s, “the only connection Negroes have had to the Memphis police force has been Negro heads colliding with nightsticks in the hands of white policemen,” Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche observed in his 1973 book The Political Status of the Negro in The Age of FDR.

Founding member of SAE at the University of Nebraska, Eugene Pace, was the quarterback of the 1982 football team.

And former and current students at Oklahoma State University (OSU) told BuzzFeed News that the Confederate flag was a permanent fixture in one of the rooms at the SAE house dating back to 1987.

On March 30, 1990, Ann Dean, a black sophomore at Kansas University, was delivering pizzas to the SAE house near campus when she encountered Matthew Willenborg, a 19-year-old student and SAE brother, along with several other members of the fraternity.

In 1992, the SAE chapter at Texas A&M University was fined $1,000 for hosting a “jungle party” featuring members in blackface and grass skirts and an activity called "slave hunts." The theme wasn’t new.

K. Quivey, and The Phoenix, the Fraternity’s present pledge manual, the most recent edition of which was published in 1995, edited by Joseph W. Walt.

Despite troubles at other SAE chapters, UA’s chapter is well regarded in the greek world. It has made impressive strides in academics as well, now ranked as having the 5th best chapter GPA among the 25 active fraternities, up from 25th in 2000.

However, it wasn't until the 2001 Fraternity Convention in Orlando, Florida that it was officially adopted as the organization's creed.

And in 2002, a Syracuse University senior and SAE member went to a campus bar in black body paint as part of his Tiger Woods costume during the fraternity’s annual bar-golf tour.

In 2006, the SAE chapter at Baylor University in Texas held an E-Dawg party, referring to the Seattle-based rapper.

Since our founding in 2007 by Alumnus Dave Christians, the Minnesota Gamma chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon has distinguished itself as one of the premiere fraternities not only at Gustavus Adolphus College - but nationally as well.

Simpson soon left the fraternity, which in the wake of the incident was temporarily suspended by the university until the spring of 2008.

Alumnus Scott Broady, class of 2009, was awarded “Fraternity Man of The Year” by the Inter-Greek Senate at Gustavus.

Men dress up as gangsters, a former pledge, who was part of the chapter in 2010, told BuzzFeed News.

Austin Nicol, who left SAE in 2011, said that the black member was a student athlete and “that might be the only reason he was let in.”

In response to growing concerns about the lack of diversity in SAE after the Oklahoma University video, the national organization of SAE said that approximately 20% of its 15,000 members self-identified as a minority or non-Caucasian, based on data gathered since 2013.

On March 7, 2014 the National Leadership of Sigma Alpha Epsilon announced and became the first Fraternity to return to our original membership model with the elimination of the system of pledging.

But on March 8, 2015, a grainy cell phone video of fraternity members from the University of Oklahoma’s SAE chapter shouting a racist chant spread across the internet.

In 2018, the Supreme Council felt it was time to update SAE’s outward appearance and strengthen our collective voice as True Gentlemen.