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. 1. See Nicholas L. Syrett, The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), for a history of American fraternities. A summary history of American fraternities and sororities is also offered by Craig L. Torbenson in his essay "From the Beginning: A History of Collegiate Fraternities and Sororities," in Craig L. Torbenson and Gregory S. Parks, eds., Brothers and Sisters: Diversity in College Fraternities and Sororities (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 15-45. The popular compendium Baird's Manual American Collegiate Fraternities first appeared in 1879 and came out in multiple editions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attesting to the popularity of fraternities in American colleges and universities. See also Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1962) for coverage of the scholarly and social activities of students. 2. Charles H. Wesley, The History of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Development in College Life, 1906-1979 (Chicago: Foundation Publishers, 2000; original edition, Howard University Press, 1929). Wesley lists the topics discussed on pages 21-22 in his book. Wesley's book was first written in 1929 and is the earliest definitive history of Alpha Phi Alpha. His access to the earliest written minutes for Alpha Phi Alpha from 1906-1909 allowed him to reproduce the minutes in appendix 2, appendix 3, and appendix 8. These transcribed documents are not part of the Alpha Phi Alpha records in the Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library, which begin with items from 1910. Referring to both Wesley's book and the Alpha Phi Alpha records allowed me to reconstruct locations and timelines for the events of their first decade of existence. 3. The term "Jewels" is part of the fraternity's language of respect for the founding members. Biographical information on these founding members is found in Stefan Bradley, "The First and Finest: The Founders of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity," in Gregory S. Parks, ed., Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 19-39. 4. My research benefits from recent publications on African Americans and the built environment, such as Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander, eds., We Shall Independent Be: African American Place- making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2008), and Amber N. Wiley, "The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power, and African American Cultural Heritage," Buildings & Landscapes 20, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 95-128. 5. Dell Upton, "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," Places 2, no. 2 (1984): 59-72. 6. Several historians have investigated spaces created for male socializing and living. See, for example, Paula Lupkin, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and William Moore, Masonic Temples: Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes (Knoxville: Un
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