True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  “These traditions go back to the founding of the university,” Counts told me. “It tears you up inside that this happened. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This wasn’t what we were about.”

  The former SAE social chairman has shown his devotion to the university in many ways. Five months after my visit, President Boren inducted Counts into the Seed Sower Society, meaning he had given at least $1 million to the University of Oklahoma. In his case, he was singled out for support of athletics, including the Headington Hall project and the Sooner Air Program. Counts ferries coaches around on his Cessna jet when they make scouting missions to high schools across the country.

  Counts picked up a dog-eared purple volume, entitled the “Songs of Sigma Alpha Epsilon,” published in 1921. “I can tell you I took a look through it to try to find that song,” he told me. “It wasn’t anywhere.”

  Some of the lyrics have a nostalgic Southern flavor, such as “The Beacon Song”: “In the happy, sunny South, SAE first saw the light / And arose to be a beacon in the land.” There is also the old standard, “Sing, Brothers, Sing,” a rousing work that evokes straw hats and barbershop quartets:

  When we came up from Dixie land a score of years ago,

  Our rivals met us with a band; They thought we were a show.

  But they were very wrong, you know, to do the way they did,

  They are just forty times too slow, for we get the men they bid,

  I tell you…

  Sing, brothers, sing; Sing brothers sing;

  And let Phi Alpha Ring. Sing, Brothers, Sing.

  I asked Counts to play the video of his son and his friends apologizing, so I could look at it more carefully and match names to faces. After we watched it together, Counts, normally upbeat and garrulous, found himself at a loss for words. “It makes me want to cry,” he said. “These guys…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

  On a break for lunch, Counts introduced me to his old friend and SAE fraternity brother, Rusty Johnson, a Vietnam veteran who now owns an oil and gas company with one hundred wells. We met at Earl’s Rib Palace, on a commercial strip near his office. With a mostly male clientele, it was the kind of place where the waitress calls you “Baby” and hub caps and license plates decorate the walls. The men reminisced about the annual trips they took to Las Vegas with their 1960s pledge brothers.

  “My badge was a big deal for me,” said Johnson, who can count a dozen family members who belonged to SAE. “It was a big deal when I pinned my badge on my oldest and youngest sons. Once they earned the badges, it’s really special to pin it on them. It was really one of the highlights of my life.”

  Counts and Johnson are part of a group of SAE alumni who were quietly trying to bring the chapter back to the campus. They needed to strike a delicate balance because they know how precarious their position has become. Although some alumni criticized Boren for what he said after the video became public, Counts was far more measured. “He’s been a great president,” Counts said. “He needed to take quick action, but I think he painted all SAEs with a broad brush that wasn’t fair.” Counts said a college wouldn’t shut down a football team because of a few players’ behavior. “What’s the statute of limitations for a nine-second video?” Johnson asked. “I can guarantee you that you get a bunch of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old guys together for a while and somebody is going to do something stupid. What happened at OU could have happened anywhere.” It sounded like the rationale I heard about drinking: everybody does it, and fraternities are scapegoats. It was worth asking the question: Would the song have flourished anywhere? Would it have survived at a school without fraternities or pledging?

  Johnson and Counts acknowledged how the chapter’s recruitment strategy thwarted diversity. “We gave preference to legacies, so a lot of pledges would end up being white guys from large metropolitan areas,” Counts said. At times, he sounded like a college admissions officer interested in promoting a class more reflective of the general population. “We would like to see more ethnic diversity,” he said. “We would like to see more geographic diversity, too.” In Counts’s view, that kind of membership would have saved the chapter. “If we had five black guys in the house, would that song have ever existed?” he said. “Nope. It is sort of self-correcting. People aren’t going to offend their friends.” Counts’s point rang true; a diverse membership would certainly have saved the chapter.

  SAE was hardly the only segregated fraternity. After the racist video surfaced, the University of Oklahoma’s Student Affairs Office surveyed its Greek Row and discovered that many other traditionally white fraternities had no black members. By 2017, amid a university push for diversity, all but two chapters included some African American members. Still, overall, blacks amounted to less than 3 percent of members. (The chapters had many more Latinos and Native Americans.) President Boren told me African American enrollment at the university had risen since the incident because families appreciated the stand the school had taken. “It was like we declared war on intolerance,” Boren said. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons.”

  COUNTS HAD INVITED me to a tailgate and home football game, something of a state holiday in Oklahoma. That Saturday, several dozen SAE boosters drank beer and soda on a parking lot under a tent in the colors of the American flag. It was a low-key affair because the fraternity had been banned from the campus, and members were gathering just a few blocks from President Boren’s house. Most were alumni, although sorority women and a few undergraduate members showed up, some wearing Game Day polo shirts with subtle SAE logos. Near the tent, Howard Dixon, the former SAE chef, grilled bratwurst. The Jamaican-born Dixon worked for fifteen years at the chapter house, where he was known for his chicken fried steak and chicken and waffles. Dixon wore an SAE lion necklace, a gift from one of the members. Among the tall, athletic guests, the five-foot-tall Dixon stood out. He was also the only black person at the gathering, as he often was in the fraternity house. Dixon lost his job when the university shut the chapter down. Members raised tens of thousands of dollars for him, and another Greek house promptly hired him. In her essay, the Southern Methodist University professor had suggested the members of the chapter, rather than be expelled, meet with their beloved cook, who might ask: “Is this what you really think of me?” I asked Dixon about the song. Like the pastors and civil-rights leaders, he offered forgiveness. “We all need to love each other,” he told me. “When you cut yourself, you bleed red. So do I. Accidents happen. I’m just glad I can be here to help. As long as there is SAE, I’ll be here.”

  After the tailgate, Counts and his wife, Alison, who was a member of the Oklahoma Delta Delta Delta sorority, joined the throngs in Sooners colors of crimson and cream making their way to the sold-out football stadium. The couple, both of whom are avid photographers, had all-access passes, which let them capture the action from the sidelines. They planned to give their photos to the Athletic Department as well as hang them in their offices. Alison Counts pointed out the billboard for Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores, which was bright yellow with a red heart. Billionaires Tom and Judy Love, who built a single gas station into a chain of 380 convenience stores in forty states, spent millions as primary sponsors, alongside Coca-Cola and AT&T. Their grandchildren belonged to the SAE chapter. “They were none too happy when their two kids were kicked out of the house,” Alison told me. At that moment, it became especially clear to me just how powerfully SAE had transgressed. University presidents are often cowed by the power of the fraternities; yet Boren had seen the video and shut down the chapter almost immediately.

  In the Counts’s luxury box, high above the fifty-yard line, family and guests, many SAE alumni, dined on shrimp cocktails and barbecue while watching the Sooners obliterate Iowa State, 52–16. In the front row, Jack Counts III sat next to Lindsay Strunk, a nineteen-year-old sophomore and member of the sorority Pi Beta Phi. Strunk told me about their first date aboard the infamous bus. The younger Counts had apologized to her, and the moment had passed
quickly. They had recently enjoyed spending time together at a Halloween party thrown by former SAE members. Dates tried to match each others’ costumes. Counts, with his shock of curly blond hair, and Strunk, with her long, straight blonde hair, already looked like a matched set. But they played along. Counts wore a bear suit and Strunk a gold dress and a sash that read “Honey.” Parkhurst, who was also in the luxury box, had his arm around Corina Hernandez, the Mexican American former beauty queen and sorority sister from Oklahoma State. Their first date on the bus had also blossomed into a long-term relationship. Hernandez told me that online commenters had been calling for the expulsion of the women on the bus, too. At the time, she worried her name would get out. “When it happened, I was just dumbfounded,” she said. “I felt there wasn’t time to do anything. I also remember all those white faces. I’m thinking, ‘I’m the only person who isn’t white.’”

  Colleges purport to encourage interactions across the silos of class, race, and ethnicity; here, a fraternity thwarted its own members’ natural inclination to learn from other students. Hernandez made Parkhurst more sensitive to the perils of bigotry. Parkhurst told me he had planned to bring up the song in the next chapter meeting. I imagined how SAE’s Oklahoma chapter could have gone in another direction. It could have promoted its members’ tolerance and respect. Instead, it brought out the worst in them.

  IN DOWNTOWN OKLAHOMA City, the Elemental Café offers “micro-lot” beans from farms in Ethiopia and Costa Rica and “single-origin” cocoa powder. From its floor-to-ceiling windows, you can see the Oklahoma City federal courthouse, site of one of the nation’s worst terrorist attacks, inspired in part by the Turner Diaries, a book revered by white supremacists. This juxtaposition of multiculturalism and racism seemed like a fitting place to meet the last African American member to have joined the University of Oklahoma chapter of SAE.

  William Bruce James II, who graduated in 2005 and was now a lawyer, grew up in Ada, Oklahoma, population 17,000, where his father was a senior vice president of a bank. A National Merit Scholar at a math and science magnet school, he had considered historically black Howard University and Dartmouth but chose Oklahoma because he was offered a full scholarship and it was close to home. When he enrolled in 2001, James wanted to join Omega Psi, a historically black fraternity whose members included the poet Langston Hughes and civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson. His mother told him to steer clear because she worried about hazing.

  James felt comfortable joining a historically white fraternity. His earliest memories had been of his role in integrating white environments. He was the first African American boy in his preschool; his sister, the first African American girl. He checked out the various houses at the University of Oklahoma. Some held no appeal. To him, they seemed “cookie cutter,” populated with preppies in pastel shorts or Wall Street types with slicked-back hair. James visited SAE with a white childhood friend whose grandfather had been a member. He liked that they weren’t selling a “hedonistic fantasy,” though he did lose his way in the enormous house and stumbled on a pool table and big-screen TV. He noticed one Native American member and another from Venezuela. He liked the variety and joined the fraternity. James loved Greek life at Oklahoma. He became a “new-member educator” and “song chair” and also led homecoming rallies. During freshman year, James met the person he would end up marrying: a young white woman from the Delta Gamma sorority. They had been in a play together and fell in love. After college, his SAE friendships continued. Five of the groomsmen at his wedding were fraternity brothers. When his son was a year old, James took him to the Oklahoma SAE house and showed him his picture hanging on a wall. James dreamed of his son joining one day. Then, the morning after the chant on the bus, his wife, a therapist, showed him the video.

  “I was shocked,” James told me over a cup of herbal tea. “It was something that never should have happened. I felt like I had accomplished something at the fraternity. I thought of all the conversations I had with my pledge brothers. The whole idea of we’ll trust each other because we’re brothers. We’ve taken a giant fall.”

  James appeared on television amid the uproar over the video with another SAE member named Jonathan Davis, who had joined the chapter in 1999 and been its first black member. Heartbroken and angry, both men nevertheless came to the defense of their housemother, who had been vilified on social media for another video that came out just as the chapter was shutting down. Beauton Gilbow, a seventy-nine-year-old white woman who grew up in Arkansas, was known as Mom B. She was much beloved by members who remembered how she taught them manners and helped decorate the house with her own antique furniture. A newspaper unearthed a 2013 video that gave life to the scandal. In it, Gilbow, white haired with bright-pink lipstick, sang along with the lyrics from a rap song by Trinidad James and gleefully repeated the “N-word.” “I wouldn’t even hesitate for a split second to say Mom B. is undoubtedly not a racist,” Davis, a medical-sales representative in Colorado, told CNN at the time. “I see her being caught up in the moment. She does like to mix it up socially, and likes to have fun with the guys and their dates that they bring over to the house.” James recalled how much Gilbow cared for him and his family, and how she displayed pictures of him, his wife, and their family in the fraternity house entryway. “Mom B. means a lot to me,” he said. He called to tell her, “Hey, don’t ever use that word again, even in a song. But from me, you’re forgiven.”

  Fifty SAE brothers called and e-mailed James, asking if he was OK. He also received what he called “random” Facebook friend requests from SAEs across the country. He wondered if the senders, worried about being considered racists, wanted to prove they had a black friend. The national office invited him to teach at the leadership school, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He still has close friends from SAE, but something changed after the video. At some point—he doesn’t remember when—he and his fraternity brothers stopped offering each other the secret handshake with the interlocking pinkie fingers. He may have stopped. Or maybe they did. Out of respect, he thought. “I feel like a part of my past has been destroyed,” he said, “the part where I was an SAE.”

  James remembered some powerful moments as the chapter’s only black member. Some were uncomfortable. At times, brothers would call him the “token.” “Sometimes, I let it go,” he said. “Sometimes, I said, ‘That’s not a cool thing to say.’” James felt like his presence made a difference. A white member from a small town in Oklahoma confided in him about his own father, who had referred to someone as “a colored guy at the store.” “It felt dirty to him,” James said, suggesting a shift in his brother’s consciousness. Once, members considered throwing a party with the theme “forty ounces of frat.” They and their dates would dress up as rappers and their entourages. They would dance to hip-hop and drink malt liquor—hence, the title. In other words, it would be a classic “ghetto party,” the kind that so often ends with a fraternity lambasted online and in news articles. James saw the problem right away. Gently, he suggested it could come across as racist. “Let’s not do that,” one of the organizers said. Imagine if someone had said those simple words when the racist song made its way from the leadership school to the University of Oklahoma.

  JAMES’S ACCOUNT REMINDED me of the words of Ben Johnson, another African American SAE member. At the 2015 convention, Johnson addressed members about the racial history of SAE. A 1987 graduate of the University of California at Irvine, he was president of SAE’s alumni association. He also chaired a national diversity committee, and he urged the gathering to reckon with its racial history, not ignore it. “SAE was founded in 1856 at the University of Alabama,” he said. “It was a bad place, a bad time. SAE must respect its history, understand its history, but not be a part of it.”

  Other institutions of higher education are starting to account for their roles. More than a dozen universities, including Harvard and Brown, have taken steps to acknowledge their ties to slavery. Colleges are erecting memorials, renaming
buildings, and sponsoring research. Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, said it would offer admissions preferences to the descendants of 272 slaves it sold in 1838 to shore up its finances.

  After the Oklahoma incident, rather than reassess its past, SAE removed references to its Southern roots from its website. I decided to delve into SAE’s archives to understand what had happened generations ago, at the dawn of the era of integration. I found an extraordinary account of an SAE convention in 1951. It had long been a carefully guarded secret, and it helped explain the roots of the fraternity’s racial hostility and why it is something of a miracle SAE ended up with any black members at all.

  6

  DISCRIMINATING GENTLEMEN

  “Who Speaks with Frankness but Always with Sincerity and Sympathy”

  On a September night in 1951, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon convention in Chicago radiated exclusivity. At the Edgewater Beach Hotel, a famed resort on Lake Michigan that attracted celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Nat King Cole, SAE members and their guests danced. They swayed to the Latin rhythms of bandleader Xavier Cugat and the voice of the singer Abbe Lane, known for her sultry Spanish ballads. The men of SAE may have enjoyed their cosmopolitan, multiethnic entertainment, but they had no interest in opening up their fraternity to that kind of diversity. They agreed with US senator Richard B. Russell Jr., one of the most powerful men in Washington, who was about to become their honorary president. Russell, a politician from Georgia, was a defender of segregation.