Hicks, Albert 'Bus'

Impact on the world

Co-founded Iota Phi Theta Fraternity on the steps of Morgan State College's Hurt Gymnasium on September 19, 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement, becoming its first national president, or Founding Polaris; unlike the eight Black Greek-letter organizations founded decades earlier, often by traditional-age undergraduates at Howard University, Iota Phi Theta was established by twelve older, 'non-traditional' students, several of them military veterans and several already married with small children, who built the organization's purpose explicitly around scholarship, leadership, citizenship, fidelity, and brotherhood, coining the motto 'Building a Tradition, Not Resting Upon One.'

Life & background

Hicks was among twelve students at Morgan State College in Baltimore, several years older than the typical undergraduate and juggling full-time jobs, military veteran status, or young families alongside their studies, who gathered in September 1963 to found a fraternity reflecting their own more mature, civil rights-conscious perspective on Black brotherhood and social responsibility. As the new organization's first Founding Polaris, Hicks led Iota Phi Theta during its earliest and most precarious period, when the fraternity functioned only as a local Morgan State organization with no guarantee it would ever expand beyond that single campus, helping establish its core principles and earliest institutional identity at a moment when the surrounding city of Baltimore was itself the site of major civil rights demonstrations, including a contemporaneous six-day, 1,500-person picketing campaign against the segregated Northwood Shopping Center directly across the street from the Morgan State campus. The fraternity remained a strictly local entity for its first four years until 1967, when interest groups finally formed at Hampton Institute and Delaware State College, beginning the expansion that eventually grew Iota Phi Theta into the fifth-largest historically Black fraternity in the country, with over 300 chapters spanning 40 U.S. states and several countries including the Bahamas, Colombia, South Korea, and Japan.

Sources

1. Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc. official history; Alchetron; University of New Orleans Greek Life; Alpha Theta Omega chapter history