Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Kappa Psi Omega’s 50th Anniversary: Profound Impact (Part 2 of 3)
Frances Huntley-Cooper (l-r), Gloria Ladson-Billings, Latise Brown and Leslie Petty Not Pictured: T.R. Williams
by Jonathan Gramling
Back on January 15, 1908, Ethel Hedgemon Lyle and eight other African American women founded Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority at Howard University in Washington, D.C. It was the first Black Greek letter organization in the country that was devoted to service. Through its now 1,120 undergraduate and graduate chapters, it shows that there is power in numbers. Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., in the 2020s, set the Guinness World Record for preparing women’s hygiene kits.
And 68 years later, like the original chapter, Kappa Psi Omega was founded in Madison on May 15, 1976 through a call for service to mentor the UW-Madison undergraduate chapter, Epsilon Delta. And Kappa Psi Omega has been about service ever since.
For the AKAs, it wasn’t about status — although some of that came with being a member —, it was about doing the work of the community.
“Barbara Archia, our first president, would work us,” said Frances Huntley-Cooper, one of the chapter’s founders. “Back in the day, as I like to say, when someone asks you to do something in the chapter, there was no such thing for someone like me to say no. And I learned a lot from them. They were great mentors, educators and lawyers, women established in their careers. One of the first things that they assigned me to do was to chair their first fundraiser. It was held at the Edgewater Hotel. I always like to say that Anthony Brown was in it because he was strolling down and profiling. The purpose of the fundraiser was to raise money to give out in scholarships. I think we gave out four scholarships. We had the opportunity to be connected to one of our sorority sisters who was not a charter member, but joined our chapter shortly afterwards, Gloria Dickerson and her husband Ralph Dickerson who was the United Way chair. We were able to tap into them to help with the fundraising.”
Huntley-Cooper also enjoyed mentoring young people through the chapter.
“I enjoyed ESP,” Huntley-Cooper said. “That was a middle school program that we did. We met with them regularly out at the Fitchburg Community Center. We would have a variety of topics to work with them. So we were mentoring them, showcasing the students as well, encouraging them to excel in their skill sets. So we bring in members. We have the who’s who in our chapter. So we didn’t have to go far for our current members to share their knowledge and experience and how they got there. So these young ladies could see that they too could be anything that they wanted to be.”
The service event that Gloria Ladson-Billings felt was important was Men Who Cook.
“I think the legacy of Kappa Psi Omega is seen in the number of young people whom we have helped to go off to college,” Ladson-Billings said. “That’s been a big push for us. I also think pre-COVID, our event that raised money for those scholarships was Men Who Cook. It’s probably the one family event that was done. Many other people do dances. Well there is a very narrow band of people who come out to a dance. When you can bring anyone from Grandmom to the babies to an event, I think it is just very, very special. We’re struggling to figure out what we are going to do to replace that as a fundraiser because I think it was just so special. And I want to make sure that we acknowledge that it was the brainchild of Theresa Sanders. And her dedication to that really got us all excited and enthusiastic about it. It was a way to be a presence in this community.”
Leslie Petty also focused on food, but on a different level.
“We have about five different initiatives from each international administration,” Petty observed. “I would say that one of my favorites is Empowering Families. In that there is the Childhood Hunger Power Pack initiative. We partner with Wright Middle School to feed 18 scholars every weekend to give them meals because these are students who are on free lunch. And typically outside of that, they don’t have many options for food resources. And so those kids have green power pack bags that are delivered to them every Thursday through the school. And today, we actually did, if you will, a kind of ribbon-cutting ceremony. Because of the work that we have done since 2023, they opened a pantry. And we fill the pantry up with several thousand dollars of non-perishable foods. It can’t be any more rewarding to see how the work that we’ve done has made such an impact that the school itself decided to open a food pantry. And we decided with this initial opening to fill that entire pantry with all types of non-perishable foods.”
For T.R. Williams, the service is not just to people external to the organization. It’s also about helping each other become their better selves.
“For me, the thing that I would like to highlight that has been such a benefit is the way that the sorority pours into me as an individual,” Williams said. “I think that when you are talking about a community and creating community, it’s important to share history, culture and traditions. It’s important to have accountability. It’s important not to just have an echo chamber of people who agree with you. It’s important to have someone in your circle who is a few years older or more than you. I think having elders is important. And so between the professional development opportunities, the leadership summits, the ways in which my sisters have done amazing things in their careers that they may be retired from, even though when an AKA retires, it means she has two less jobs than she had before, all of those things help me to grow as a person and not just in a selfish way. It allows me to be a better community member and global citizen. That is what I have really taken from this almost two years of being in the chapter. It has been so amazing.”
Even though she is a dean at Madison College, Petty also finds the personal growth that Kappa Psi Omega has to offer very complementary to what she does as a professional.
“Being a part of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority is also an opportunity to learn and grow,” Petty emphasized. “There are many opportunities to learn more about leadership, to learn more about how to operate finances for a small, mid-sized or large organization. It is a continual process of learning either formally or informally. So this past year, I actually became part of the Wisconsin Association of Parliamentarians. I would have never considered learning Roberts Rules of Order had it not been through the influence, the understanding of how to formally run a successful, efficient business meeting. Those skill sets allow me, because I also chair nonprofit boards, to apply those skill sets. I would have never considered it had I not been in a community of women who strive for excellence and high standards. We don’t do anything halfway. We go all the way and we do it with excellence.”
Latise Brown was thrown into the breach of service as an undergraduate member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority at UW-Milwaukee.
“I was actually president of my undergraduate chapter two months after I joined,” Brown said. “So we were very highly active. We did a major fundraising event for Hurricane Katrina, which had just occurred. We had a very well-attended party. And we actually donated $3,000 as an undergraduate chapter to a family that had been affected by Katrina. We were very active. I still have my scrapbook of all of our activities and community service projects. I learned a lot of my leadership skills and learned the importance of the service to the sorority and not just the social part. The service aspect was something that we made sure we were on top of in our chapter at that time.”
And Brown’s commitment to service has continued as a member of Kappa Psi Omega.
“I was the chair of the A.S.C.E.N.D. mentorship program for 2-3 years,” Brown said. “That program was under an international administration at the time. That was designed specifically for high school students and it was a co-ed program. It wasn’t just designed for high school young ladies. We served male and female students. We partnered with the Middleton-Cross Plains School District and mentored their high school students. We met monthly on a Saturday for three hours. And we covered a wide range of topics and activities. Our students were actually able to go to Washington, D.C. and were supported by Gloria Ladson-Billings. She gave a very generous donation to allow our students to be able to go free. We just had a lot of different projects and programs during that 2-3 years.”
