Little, Mary Lou Allison Gardner

Impact on the world

Gathered six fellow Black schoolteachers at her Indianapolis home in 1922 to found Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority at Butler University, the only one of the four historically African American National Pan-Hellenic Council sororities established at a predominantly white institution rather than at Howard University; the founding took place in a state where, by some estimates, roughly a third of native-born white men belonged to a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, with the Indiana Klan's Grand Dragon residing in the same Indianapolis neighborhood as the university itself. Little authored the new sorority's pledge and served as its first national president, or Grand Basileus, from 1925 to 1926, helping evolve it from a professional teachers' organization into a national collegiate sorority that today counts roughly 75,000 members across the United States and the Caribbean.

Life & background

Born in Kentucky in 1896 and orphaned around age three after both her parents died, Little was separated from her brother and raised by a family friend in Indianapolis, earning a scholarship to the John Herron Art Institute during high school before graduating from Shortridge High School in 1915 and her teaching certificate from Indianapolis Normal School in 1918. While teaching in Indianapolis and attending Butler University part-time, she gathered six fellow educators, Dorothy Hanley Whiteside, Vivian White Marbury, Nannie Mae Gahn Johnson, Hattie Mae Dulin Redford, Bessie Mae Downey Rhoades Martin, and Cubena McClure, at her own home in 1922 specifically to discuss raising professional standards among Black teachers by encouraging them to pursue full undergraduate degrees rather than stopping at normal-school certification; the resulting Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority became, within a university whose own administration would adopt a discriminatory Black enrollment quota just five years later, the first Black sorority founded on any predominantly white American college campus. She moved to Los Angeles in 1928, completed her undergraduate training at UCLA, and taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 35 years until her 1967 retirement; the sorority's highest chapter honor, the Mary Lou Allison Loving Cup, remains named for her, and she died in 1992 having seen the organization she founded grow to 70,000 members across 400 chapters.

Sources

1. Sigma Gamma Rho); The Butler Collegian; Zeta Nu Sigma chapter history; Los Angeles Alumnae Chapter founders page; Butler University Diversity, Equity & Inclusion office