Diggs, Elder Watson

Impact on the world

Led the founding of Kappa Alpha Nu, later renamed Kappa Alpha Psi, at Indiana University on January 5, 1911, after Black students there were barred from campus dormitories, recreational facilities, and contact sports; the new organization became the first incorporated Black fraternity in U.S. history when Indiana granted it a state charter that May, and Diggs personally pawned his own watch to help cover the incorporation fee, going on to serve as the fraternity's first Grand Polemarch, or national president, for six consecutive years. He was a first cousin of Lucy Diggs Slowe, already profiled in this collection as a founder of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and the first Black woman to serve as a university Dean of Women, making the two cousins founders of two separate, historic Black Greek-letter organizations within the same family.

Life & background

Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1883, Diggs received only a one-room schoolhouse education before graduating from Indiana State Normal School in 1908 and enrolling at Howard University the following year, where he befriended fellow student Byron Kenneth Armstrong; the two transferred together to Indiana University in 1910, becoming two of only ten Black students on a campus where they were excluded from dormitories, recreational facilities, and contact sports, with one local newspaper later reporting that white students almost entirely ignored their Black peers. Working as a campus waiter at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house to support himself, Diggs grew determined to establish an organization that could provide Black students the community and support the university denied them, and on January 5, 1911, he and nine others formally founded what was first incorporated as Kappa Alpha Nu, with Diggs serving as chairman, a role later renamed Grand Polemarch. He personally completed the fraternity's first constitution and initiation ceremony, took a course in Greek heraldry and mythology to ensure the new organization's symbols were authentic, and later selected the Greek letter Psi to replace the original 'Nu,' giving the fraternity its lasting name in 1915. Diggs married his childhood sweetheart in secret in 1912, since Indiana law at the time barred married women from teaching and his wife worked as a public school teacher; she died the following year, leading him to briefly withdraw from his studies to care for her, and he later remarried. He became, in 1916, the first African American to graduate from Indiana University's School of Education, served as an Army lieutenant in World War I, and continued working as a school principal in Indianapolis for 26 years, an institution renamed Elder W. Diggs School in his honor after his 1947 death.

Sources

1. Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc. official history; Kentucky Commission on Human Rights; Indiana Historical Bureau; Nupepedia; South Central Province of Kappa Alpha Psi; African American Registry