How Greek Life Stayed Segregated at Bama.....Until 2013

Part Three: "Not a Good Fit"

Welcome to Part Three of Bama Confidential, a week-long series that goes deep into the past and present of Greek Life at the University of Alabama. If you missed Part One — on sorority rush — or just want to read the intro to the series, and how it found its way to Culture Study, you can find it here. You can read Part Two, on The Machine, here. If you want to explore the content coming out of #Rushtok this week, I’m curating it over on my Instagram (and make sure and check the pinned stories).

Regular Culture Study Readers: This series will arrive in your inbox every morning this week. If it’s not your thing, don’t worry, we’ll be back to regular Culture Study programming next Sunday. If you’re not a Culture Study subscriber but want to make sure you don’t miss the next installments, just sign-up below. 

---

For sororities and fraternities, the experience of Rush is opposite in almost every way imaginable. For women, there’s not a drop of alcohol in sight; even asking about the sort of parties you attend can get you flagged as “in it for the wrong things.” The entire process is regimented and controlled; in many ways, sorority rush is just a test of your ability to maintain a very high level of polish no matter the circumstances. The parties are all during the day; the glasses are filled with ice water. For guys, there’s barely even a schedule, and certainly no suggested outfits. There’s just a bunch of events: cliff diving, skeet shooting, golfing, hiking, house tours where you see just how big the big screen TV is. They have parties, too. With a lot of alcohol. 

Jake Sacco, a Phi Delta Theta brother who graduated from Bama a couple of years ago, described the process this way: you “show up to a party and shotgun some beers and we’ll see if we like talking to you or if you’re a good fit.” 

I know what fraternity Rush was like at my college; I know what the guys at Bama told the girls about what fraternity Rush was like; I’ve watched a lot of those fraternity recruitment videos. And yet: so much of fraternity rush remains opaque. Not because it’s some big secret — but because guys simply don’t have much to say about it. Every fraternity brother I talked to told me that Rush was — wait for it — chill. 

If you want to watch one of those recruitment videos for yourself, here’s a pretty classic one for Pike — Pi Kappa Alpha.

But if you don’t want to subject yourself to that much dubstep, I’ll describe it for you: The intro is a montage of parties on a gigantic patio (one of the ones carefully shielded from passersby by black paper on party days) with shots of kegs and people in face paint for game day. Every dude has spent way too much time on their pecs.

The montage dissolves into a guided tour of the house. “This is our living room,” the Pike Vice President and video tour guide, Tyler Schaeffer, says. “Brothers come here to hang out, watch movies, chill and shoot pool in between classes.” After the living room, the camera winds through the house’s massive dining room, the back patio yard, and multiple rooms with wall-spanning TVs and sectionals. One’s got a giant poster of JFK smoking a cigarette near an advertisement for White Claw alcoholic seltzer. The president’s bedroom is off limits for the video because, as he puts it, that’s “where the magic happens.”

As part of my reporting, I talked to the guys who shot this video. One of them was Jake. The other was his business partner in Q6 Media, Ryan O’Malley, also a former Bama fraternity brother. They started out making these videos while at UA, and still regularly produce them for various fraternities. 

We watched the Pike video together, and I complimented them on a particular steadicam shot of the weights in the home gym setup – a transition Ryan noted he was proud of at the time – before I noted that somehow every room was described as “just for guys to hang out and chill.” They laughed. “By the fourth room,” Ryan said, “We were like, Dude, you gotta say something different.” 

I talk with Ryan and Jake about how they got their start filming fraternity recruitment videos.

But chill is the appropriate word here — at least for Rush. Which isn’t to say that this process isn’t high stakes. Getting into a good fraternity can have ripple effects for the rest of your adult life. As one former student told us: “You're like your royalty at this school. You're like a higher class.” It’s just… simpler. Chill. Because that’s the vibe they want to put out to dudes, and the vibe they want prospective members to project back. Which house is filled with guys you want to hang with? Are you, random 18-year-old with very little developed personality, going to be a decent hang? Are you going to extend our reputation for a good time, or compromise it? 

Now, Jake is obviously a decent hang: he was given a bid by three different fraternities. Which is, obviously, another big difference. Unlike the sororities, where the complex matching system builds to such a climax at Bid Day, with just one offer on the table, Jake just went to enough parties and eventually people started asking him to pledge. And he didn’t have much more to say about the entire process. In his words, “it’s just so laid back and unstructured.”

Jake’s production partner, Ryan, had an even more chill experience. Ryan visited the UA campus as a high school senior and was invited to a "Rush Party," thrown specifically for high schoolers planning to come to school in the fall. His older brother’s friend was a member of Kappa Sigma, as was a guy he’d played baseball with back home. “We were hanging out and then at the end of the night they were like, ‘Hey, like, just wanna let you know you've got a bid to Kappa Sigma. Uh, you either accept it or you're a loser.’” He accepted. “And it was just over like that.” 

There was no auditing of his social media accounts. There were no slide shows with his picture stating what zip code he lived in or where his father worked. No discussion about how much his pants cost or cards to score your interactions hidden around the rooms. 

Jake and Ryan talk about just how “chill” the frats are.

To make it into a top tier fraternity, you just have to be the right combination of fun and cool. You have to be chill but down to party. And — at least until the early 2000s — you pretty much had to be white.

●

The University of Alabama is the setting of one of the most infamous photos of the last century. On June 11th, 1963, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium in what’s become known as “The Stand at the Schoolhouse Door,” attempting to block two Black students — Vivian Malone and James Hood — from enrolling in the aftermath of desegregation. Wallace was unsuccessful, but the legacy of that moment, and the decades of history that preceded it, have never left UA. The university at large was forcefully desegregated. But that didn’t mean Greek Life followed. 

Blame it on inertia, blame it on tradition, blame it on racism, attribute it to Black students gravitating towards the historically Black sororities and fraternities on campus — whatever the reason, university administrators understood that the optics were very bad. In 2001, they actively assisted incoming freshman Melody Twilley — the first Black student to Rush the all-white sororities — by setting up meetings with sorority leaders and facilitating recommendations at a number of houses. 

But the Machine, according to the Los Angeles Times, allegedly “didn’t want to let her in.” And it got its way. The sororities ignored Melody and the university administration. And… that was the end of it. E. Culpepper Clark, a dean at the university and author of The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama, declared “God almighty, this is sad.” But it doesn’t appear that any further action was taken. (Similar to yesterday’s piece, we reached out to all of the named sororities and fraternities concerning components of this story; none have responded).

To clarify, Greek Life at Bama wasn’t entirely white at the time — just the “top tier” houses, many of which were founded as exclusively white organizations in the post-Civil War South. There was also the Divine Nine, a flourishing system of Black houses also called Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs). Of those nine, eight have chapters at the University of Alabama. Like the historically white Greek Organizations, each of these BGLO houses has stereotypes and traditions and tremendous pressure to follow in the paths of your parents. 

Jared Hunter could’ve followed that path. But he also saw a different path to power: one that went straight through the big, old school, incredibly white fraternity houses. 

Jared has understood himself as ambitious from an early age. He went to a prestigious prep school; he did debate and mock trial; he did Boys States, the nerdy statewide program for kids hell bent on going into politics. His dream was to go to Georgetown University, a key feeder program for the federal government. But when the University of Alabama offered him a full ride and then some, he took the deal. 

Jared’s father had been a member of Omega Psi Phi, one of Divine Nine Black houses, and was dedicated to the fraternity. After graduating, he continued to pay his dues, helped organize their annual New Year’s Eve fundraiser, and religiously attended fraternity meetings. “Like, literally every Sunday,” Jared told me. It was a big part of his father’s identity. But Omega Psi Phi didn’t interest Jared, in part because he didn’t feel like he’d fit in there.

He’d grown up as one of the only Black students in a wealthy — and mostly white — community outside of Montgomery, Alabama. These were the types of guys he knew; he’d gone to high school with them and wore the same clothes as them from the same bass fishing shops. He knew, in other words, how to be the one Black friend to the rich white people who’d swear there wasn’t a racist bone in their body (just in their family graveyards). 

Jared also knew he was an “ideal” first Black member for a Bama fraternity. And the fraternities, it seemed, agreed. “I was actually approached by two alumni from an organization on campus that basically wanted me to join in an effort to integrate the fraternity,” he told me. This fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega — ATO — had never had a Black member at UA. Jared met these alums (in their 50's or 60's but still policing who gets into their old fraternity) at a Starbucks. “It felt like a job interview,” he recalled. Pretty awkward, sure, but Jared felt like it went well. 

On campus, Jared went to other ATO recruitment events. He showed up at the parties, putting himself on the market – saying hey there, I’m available. But eventually, he sort of just stopped hearing from them. Again, fraternity rush is so casual that it can be hard to figure out exactly what is happening. But in this case, Jared was definitely being dropped. “You get a vibe of I don't think that they're interested anymore.”

Jared talks about his initial rush experience.

Jared was disappointed — and confused. After all, they’d reached out to him. Perhaps the weight of history was too great after all. Maybe he should consider his dad’s fraternity, or give up on the Greek system altogether? But then he made friends with a sophomore named Kennedi Cobb — and decided to try again. 

●

On paper, Kennedi Cobb was an ideal sorority sister — exactly the kind of person these Greek organizations should be fighting over to join their ranks. She had a 4.3 GPA in high school and was salutatorian of her class. Her grandfather was a prominent Alabama judge who happened to sit on the university board of trustees. But in the sorority world, grades and connections can only take you so far. Not a single one of the panhellenic sororities on campus – there were 16 at the time – gave her a bid. Because like Jared, and like Melody Twilley, Kennedi was Black. 

Every year, hundreds of girls who rush at UA don’t end up with a bid. Sometimes they just didn’t play the game correctly: not enough recs, wrong outfits, too much social media, didn’t talk to enough girls, whatever. But Kennedi’s rejection wasn’t the result of a social faux pas or a fluke of the system. After Rush, a few members of Alpha Gamma Delta came forward and reported that sorority leadership had nixed the tradition of deciding as a group who would make it to the next round of Rush in favor of creating a shortlist — one that didn’t include Cobb.

There’s no direct evidence that this change was made specifically to exclude Kennedi. But when those whistleblowers tried to argue for Kennedi’s inclusion, they were shut down by alumni, who according to a report in the Crimson White, said that Kennedi didn’t meet the sorority’s “letter of recommendation requirements.” A member of another sorority, Delta Delta Delta, was quoted in that same article saying the same thing happened in her house: leadership intervened in the recruitment process, and Kennedi was excluded.

If this was a calculated play to keep the sororities white then it backfired spectacularly. Within weeks, students were protesting the outcome, which quickly caught the attention of national media, including Buzzfeed, USA Today, the Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times. Then-university president, Dr. Judy Bonner, was forced to acknowledge segregation within the Greek system. She finally did what the university had refused to do back in 2001: she ordered the sororities to essentially redo Rush with an extended timeline and open admissions policy, all under university supervision. In the aftermath, ten Black women were admitted to traditionally white sororities — including Kennedi.

Let’s not forget that this all happened — and I cannot emphasize this enough — in 2013. Rush did return to normal the next year, but the message was clear: maintain this trajectory, or we’ll intervene again. And although the controversy in (again) 2013 was focused on sororities, the changes enacted in its wake affected fraternities as well.

It’s why those alumni were proactively reaching out to Jared, who arrived at UA in the fall of 2014 — part of the first cohort to rush in the aftermath of the president-enforced desegregation effort. It’s also why Jared was especially confident that he’d succeed in rushing an old, white fraternity. They had, after all, been all but forced to open their doors to people like him. And yet: they didn’t give him a bid. 

The whole process left him very deflated: “A mix of feeling left out, and then also like you're not good enough,” Jared told me. He discussed his disappointment with Kennedi. “I remember talking with her, and her saying how all of these Black women had reached out to her,” he said. The support was overwhelming, with so many people telling her you’re the first but there will be so many more because of you. “And I guess it encouraged me to try again.” So he did.

●

In his sophomore year, Jared was again being actively recruited during Rush — this time by Theta Chi, one of the fraternities that had opted not to accept a Black member the year before. Now, there was even more pressure on them to find their first Black member. And they wanted it to be Jared. 

Jared accepted the bid with no delusions. He knew they were getting something from him — the appearance of diversity. And he was getting something from them. It’s the primary reason Jared was so intent on joining one of the more elite white fraternities. “I thought that being in an IFC fraternity, I would have opportunities to be more involved with SGA [Student Government Association] and other organizations on campus that I was interested in,” Jared told me. One of those other organizations was even more elite than the fraternity itself: The Machine.

The way Jared first came to understand the Machine, he told me, was as a “pipeline” for Alabama politics — Jared’s ultimate ambition. Joining the fraternity was just the first step in that process. Next would be getting the Machine’s backing and winning the SGA presidency, thereby firmly positioning himself for the political future he’d imagined. Which, just a year after the system had rejected him entirely, is what he set about doing.

The Machine had never supported a Black student’s run for student body president. In fact, you’ll recall, that according to reports, they’ve fought against Black students even running for SGA president. In 2013, Elliot Spillers —a Black independent candidate with political smarts and almost superhuman charisma — upset the Machine’s more lackluster candidate. It was one of the very few losses they’d suffered over the years. But the Machine still controlled the rest of the SGA executive, as well as the senate. The Machine seemingly did everything they could to hinder Elliot’s efforts, using procedural tactics to deny him a chief of staff for weeks and killing every attempt at election reform.   

The Machine maintained its control, but it was a close call — and a reminder they couldn’t get too complacent when nominating SGA candidates, lest they be forced to actually campaign in face of real competition. They needed strong candidates with broad appeal, just in case. They needed someone like Jared.

When I asked Jared how it felt to be aligning himself with a historically very racist secret society, he paused, and said: “You know, it's shitty and unfortunate, but where I'm from, that could be said about so many different entities.” He pointed out that the high school he attended, St. James School in Montgomery, was founded in 1955 as a direct result of the Brown v. Board decision. It’s what’s known as a “segregation academy”: a private school that opened to white students after public schools were forced to integrate.

For Jared, when it came to the Machine, the ends justified the means. As he put it, their history is “worth reflecting on and acknowledging. But I don't also want something that's going to prohibit especially Black and brown people's career furtherance.” In other words, if the Machine could offer an opportunity, especially an opportunity that people like Jared had historically been denied, then he was gonna take it. But first, he needed to convince an organization hell-bent on maintaining the status quo… to change. And there was still plenty of change that desperately needed to come to campus.

●

Kappa Alpha Order, commonly known as KA, was co-founded by a soldier who shot himself in the foot and actually had to sit out most of the Civil War. But that hasn’t stopped members from openly fetishizing its Confederate roots. Their website still lists Gen. Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder” for, among other things, his “exemplary ideals.” And from the 1950s, it began designating one week in spring “Old South Week” to celebrate this dubious history, the climax of which was the Old South Ball. A bacchanal of antebellum nostalgia, the ball was where KA brothers could play beer pong in rebel uniforms while sorority girls outfitted in Scarlett O’Hara-style hoop-skirts and ribbons took photos draped over the fraternity’s decorative cannon.

With over 100 KA chapters nationally, maybe you’re familiar with these events from your own time at college. Or maybe you’re familiar with it because of Rachael Kirkconnell, a contestant on the 25th season of NBC’s The Bachelor — the first season to feature a Black bachelor — whose photos from an Old South Ball at Georgia College & State University resurfaced and spread over social media. The resultant scandal engulfed the show and eventually led to the departure of longtime host Chris Harrison. Turns out attending or defending a plantation party is not a good look, and KA chapters all over the country began banning the function, with gentle encouragement from nationals.

At Alabama, the Old South Party had been notorious for years. In April 2009, the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha (not to be confused with Kappa Alpha, the white fraternity) was celebrating the 35th anniversary of its UA chapter. The event happened to be on the same day as that year’s “Old South parade,” and according to multiple outlets, KA decided to briefly stop their flatbed trucks out the front of the AKA’s party. When the AKA sisters looked out their windows, they saw white men in Confederate uniforms positioned squarely in front of their house. The university did nothing. At least not until the media started amplifying what happened. 

Back in 2001, KA nationals had already banned the display of confederate flags outside chapter houses. But they hadn’t explicitly banned Confederate uniforms until 2010, following this incident with AKA at Bama. The year after that, the parade was canceled, and five years after that, KA nationals banned use of the term “Old South” for any official event. But the ball itself continues to this day. Now, the guys wear jeans and cowboy hats instead of uniforms — but the women still wear antebellum gowns. The ball has been rebranded as “Derby Day,” and Old South Day is now officially “Founders Day,” but multiple students told me that everyone at Bama still calls it “Old South.” It’s essentially confederate cosplay. And it endures, like so many traditions at UA. 

It does make you wonder: If this is the sort of thing these frats do outdoors, with just a flimsy piece of black paper separating them from the public, what are they actually keeping secret? Also: KA is a Machine fraternity. Which means that they agreed to endorse Jared’s run for SGA president. It’s a testament to how white people in power have become adept at negotiating their own apparent racism: to them, there’s no cognitive dissonance in hosting an Old South Party and endorsing a Black candidate for campus president — so long as he doesn’t, well, cancel their Old South Party. 

Again, Jared understood this. He has a graduate degree in fancy white people. And like most aspiring politicians, he’s a strategic thinker. He knew that the Machine couldn’t just keep putting up white kids from the South for president — especially given the campus-wide emphasis on increasing diversity in campus institutions. Jared had also figured out who was his fraternity’s Machine representative (“It wasn’t that hard,” he says), and he approached them with a solution: Jared was a trusted brother, someone who’d worked on other Machine campaigns, who had ideas for the SGA, and who would help with the Machine’s image problem. Together, they could make history.

“I knew the night that they were gonna vote,” Jared recalled (“they” being The Machine). “And then I just waited and waited and waited.” Finally, late that night, his representative returned to the fraternity house and told him: Jared would be the Machine-endorsed candidate for SGA president. The first Black Machine candidate ever. “Let’s get to work,” the representative said.

Jared talks about his motivation for joining a historically white fraternity.

Jared knows he was chosen to run because of his race. Be he also thinks he was the best candidate. And with Machine-backing, Jared knew his chances of winning were high — remember, Machine candidates had lost fewer than ten times in the previous century. But he still knew that anything could happen.

On election night, Jared hooked up a laptop to a big television and loaded Facebook Live, where the election board was reporting results. That’s when the stakes of the race really settled in his stomach. If he lost, it would stick to his reputation for years. He’d be the first Black Machine-backed candidate — and the first Black Machine-backed candidate who’d lost. Maybe they’d never back another Black student. Maybe it would all be his fault.

It was too late to do anything about it. And soon, the results were in. Jared’s memory of what happened next is a blur — he recalls hearing his name, and then a huge round of cheers. He ran over to his mom, who’d come down to Tuscaloosa to help pass out flyers on the quad, and hugged her. “It was such a sweet moment,” he told me. “I was so thankful that she was there to see all of the support that I had.” 

But it was much closer than it should have been: Jared won with just 54% of the vote, which is fairly low for a Machine candidate, considering the majority of voters in these elections come from Machine-affiliated Greek houses. Had Jared lost, there might have been more of an interrogation about what happened: had some Machine voters stayed home, or even voted for another (white) candidate? Was there deliberate sabotage to stop this from ever happening again? That’s just my conspiratorial thinking. Their guy won, so everyone moved on. And it didn’t matter to Jared, who became the third ever Black SGA president, and the very first to get there with Machine-backing. 

Reflecting on his conversations with Kennedi Cobb, the sorority sister who effectively ended de facto segregation in the Panhellenic sororities just a few years earlier, Jared is more circumspect. “It's a lonely road to pave,” he remembers them saying to one another. “But we're not going back.” 

●

No one’s under the illusion that the Greek System at Bama is inclusive. Acceptance still hinges on your willingness to bend to the status quo — and not just when it comes to race. 

There’s part of Jared’s story I didn’t include up top. During his first year at UA, when he was being courted by ATO, and before being dropped… Jared posted to Facebook about gay marriage (this was the mid-2010s, remember, so college students were still posting things on Facebook). It was pretty innocuous, and said nothing about the fact that Jared — who, at the time, was very much closeted — was also gay. But Jared believes it was enough to immediately stop all overtures from the various fraternities that had shown an interest.

Jared talks about his campaign as the first Machine-backed Black candidate for SGA president

Jared was willing to put himself into a box in order to get into a fraternity— he just didn’t realize how small that box still was, or how much of himself he’d still have to hide. As he described this all to me, I started nodding my head. “Ahhhh, so what they actually wanted was… Clarence Thomas,” I said. Jared immediately started laughing. “Yes,” he responded, “Yes! That’s exactly what they wanted. They wanted somebody in their Wrangler jeans to roll up in their F-150 and basically be them, but Black.” 

The status quo can change. Incrementally. Reluctantly. And often for deeply cynical reasons. The truth is that it’s designed not to change, and will often go to great lengths to prevent any sort of change from happening, cloaking that defense in terms like “tradition” and “legacy.” Sometimes tradition takes the form of an Old South Ball. And sometimes it manifests in even darker ways, as a means of filtering out who “belongs” and who doesn’t. 

In the first article of this series, I described observing sorority rush via #Rushtok as “watching power refine and reproduce itself.” Fraternities have their own power refining process — it just happens later in the year, and falls under the amorphous umbrella of “pledging.” The word sounds almost quaint, doesn’t it? Like an earnest declaration. But in practice, it’s brutal, largely still ungoverned, and protected by centuries-old bonds of “brotherhood.” It’s how fraternities elicit fidelity. And as we’ll see in tomorrow’s piece, it’s also how they buy silence. ●

---

---

Read the Rest of the Series:

Welcome to Bama Confidential

Inside "The Machine"

How Hazing Endures Behind Fraternity Doors

The Power Funnel