Armstrong, Byron Kenneth

Impact on the world

Co-founded Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity at Indiana University in 1911 alongside Elder Watson Diggs, serving as one of the new organization's first three Grand Board members and helping draft its founding ritual, coat of arms, and constitution over the fraternity's earliest, most fragile years; he went on to earn a doctorate from the University of Michigan and build an academic career spanning multiple universities and deanships, a level of formal education unusually high among the fraternity's ten founders.

Life & background

Born in Westfield, Indiana in 1892, Armstrong enrolled at Howard University in 1909, where he met Elder Watson Diggs; after Armstrong's cousin Irven, already a student at Indiana University, persuaded him to visit, Armstrong convinced Diggs to transfer there with him in 1910. Facing the same exclusion from campus social and recreational life that affected all of Indiana University's small number of Black students, Armstrong joined Diggs and eight others in founding Kappa Alpha Nu, later Kappa Alpha Psi, on January 5, 1911, serving on the fraternity's original three-person Grand Board alongside Diggs and John Milton Lee and personally working with Diggs to develop the new organization's earliest ritual and symbols, including a stretch of work the two completed together while both employed as waiters at a Fort Wayne, Indiana hotel during a college summer break. He went on to earn his bachelor's degree from Indiana University in philosophy, mathematics, and sociology in 1913, a master's degree from Columbia University in 1914, and ultimately a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1940, building a long academic career as a professor at universities in Florida, Indiana, Kansas, and Michigan and serving as an academic dean in both Maryland and Oklahoma. He remained connected to his fraternity's history and legacy for the rest of his long life, living to see Kappa Alpha Psi grow into an international organization with hundreds of chapters before his death in 1980 at age 88.

Sources

1. Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc. official history; South Central Province of Kappa Alpha Psi; CPAC chapter history