A week ago, I picked up a box of junk items at auction, tempted to see what else was inside after viewing a few items on the top. I do that sometimes: Spend 5 bucks for a box lot just to see what else I can discover inside that is interesting.

I was delighted to find a book and pamphlet published by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the first black Greek-letter sorority founded in 1908 at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The AKAs celebrated their 100^th anniversary in 2008 with a huge convention/boule in the city. And Mattel even came out with a special AKA Barbie doll to commemorate the centennial.

I’m not an AKA (I pledged Sigma Gamma Rho in college and never got around to joining a graduate chapter). But I’m pleased with the good work that all four black sororities – including Delta Sigma Theta and Zeta Phi Beta – do through their community projects. As I perused the AKA book, it seemed that they’d been doing good the first 50 years, too. One chapter in the book focused on a health project begun in the 1930s that grew out of a project to upgrade the standards of rural teachers.

The auction book, a first edition from 1958, is a history of the organization by educator Marjorie H. Parker called “Alpha Kappa Alpha 1908-1958.” Parker went on to write four more editions of the book, the latest in 1999. Parker died in 2006. (Her photo at right is from the AKA website.)

Parker had been commissioned by the AKAs in December 1956 to write the history. She was an associate professor of education at the District of Columbia Teachers College and a visiting lecturer in history and philosophy at Howard. In August 1958, she became basileus/president of the sorority when the 50^th anniversary convention was held in Washington.

The book included all the boules, officers and chapters of the sorority.

The book was published by the sorority itself. It still had its pink dust jacket with the green ivy leaf (there were some tears at the top). The hardcover had some marks on the front and back, and the book itself was slightly warped. The owner had written her name on the outside edges of the pages: Ivy Barbara Inez McCray. She wrote on the pamphlet that was a member of the Zeta chapter.

The 24-page pamphlet appeared to be part of a Negro Heritage Series. This one was “Negro Women in the Judiciary,” produced by the AKAs in 1968. According to the introduction, this was the “first in a series of publications on the Negro heritage of individual achievement against great odds.” The pamphlets were distributed in schools and organizations as stories of inspiration.

Profiled were 10 black female judges, including Juanita Kidd Stout (Pennsylvania Supreme Court), the first black woman elected judge in the United States, and Constance Baker Motley (New York), a federal court judge who initially made her mark as a civil rights attorney in Brown v. Board of Education.

This was a good find, especially since a lot of our history has been lost or wasn’t written.

Also, read about Bernice Greene, one of the earliest members of the AKAs who was profiled as one of our Mighty Black Women.

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1. Finding “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
2. A love affair with the automat
3. Cookbooks: How I found Julia Child & Abby Fisher