The Tribune

PHI Beta Sigma Fraternity, founded at Howard University on January 9, 1914, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2014, with a year long slate of activities designed to highlight the organisation’s contributions to American and international history over the past century.

Internationally known by the Greek name, “Sigmas,” Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Incorporated, it was founded by three young scholars – Abram Langston Taylor, Leonard Francis Morse and Charles Ignatius Brown.

The fraternity’s membership has grown to span four continents, and includes members of all races, religions, ethnicities and nationalities.

More than 150,000 men have become members of Phi Beta Sigma over the past 100 years, represented in over 700 chapters.

Phi Beta Sigma said it has a near century long commitment to service that is centred in the fraternity’s three international programmes – Bigger and Better Business; Education and Social Action.

These programmes represent the core of Sigma’s initiatives and are carried out at the international, national, regional and local levels.

For more than 60 years, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity has made manhood training for young boys a fraternity priority through its Sigma Beta Club founded in 1950.

Today, Phi Beta Sigma Bahamas boasts of two firsts within the international fraternity – the first undergraduate chapter (Beta Beta Lambda at the College of the Bahamas 2004) of any fraternal organisation outside of the US and its territories, and the first alumni chapter (Delta Epsilon Sigma 1978) of the fraternity in a Caribbean nation.

Among the hundreds of notable members throughout Sigma’s history are: the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Dr Alain Leroy Locke; the first black executive secretary of the NAACP and writer of the “Black National Anthem”, Lift Every Voice and Sing, James Weldon Johnson; the person singularly responsible for saving the South’s agriculture industry with his 20th Century advancements in crop rotation, Dr George Washington Carver; the founder of the first AFL-CIO endorsed black labour union, A Phillip Randolph; the first president of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, now Congressman John Lewis; the most significant figure in America’s Pro-Black Radical movement and co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence, Dr Huey P Newton; Chicago’s first black Mayor Harold Washington; and the 7th United States Secretary of Education Rod Paige.

In the Bahamas, prominent members include Kendal Major, Speaker of the House of Assembly; Shane Gibson, Minister of Immigration, Labour and Training; Hon Phenton Neymour, former Minister of the Environment and trade unionist; Raymond Winder, managing parter at Deloitte, Junior Achievement Bahamas chairman and former Bahamas’ World Trade Organisation chief negotiator; Rev Dr Enoch Backford, educator, sports icon and civil service giant; Ryan Antonio, BTC VP for credit and collections; Bradley Cooper, two-time Olympian; Canon Crosley Walkine, rector of St Matthews Anglican Church; Kevin Hanna, Bank of the Bahamas Treasury Head; Phil Smith (deceased), veteran broadcaster; and Omar Archer, director of Campus Life at the College of the Bahamas

Phi Beta Sigma also counts among its members four American educated African Presidents – Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah; Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe; William VS Tubman, the 19th president of Liberia; and Dr William Tolbert, the 20th president of Liberia, as well as one American President, William Jefferson Clinton.

The grand centennial celebration will occur in July 2014, when Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity members will return to Washington and will be joined by their sisters from Zeta Phi Beta Sorority for five days of celebratory activities throughout the city.

Entitled the “Centennial Jubilee,” it will be held from July 16-20.