Spruill, Lonnie C. Jr.

Impact on the world

Co-founded Iota Phi Theta Fraternity at Morgan State College in September 1963 alongside eleven fellow students, several of whom, including Spruill himself, had been close friends since grade school, and succeeded founding president Albert Hicks to become the fraternity's second national president, or Grand Polaris, serving from 1963 to 1964 during the organization's fragile earliest year as a strictly local Baltimore institution.

Life & background

Spruill's friendship with fellow founder Frank Coakley reportedly extended back to their shared childhood as preschoolers, and his friendships with founders Elias Dorsey Jr. and Charles Gregory dated to grade school, making him part of a tightly knit social network whose decades-long personal bonds directly preceded and shaped the fraternity they built together as 'non-traditional' students at Morgan State College in 1963. After Albert Hicks completed his term as the new organization's first Founding Polaris, Spruill succeeded him as the fraternity's second national president from 1963 to 1964, helping guide Iota Phi Theta through its precarious first full year of existence as a single-campus organization with no assurance of wider survival, during the same period its members were actively engaged in civil rights demonstrations against segregated businesses near their Baltimore campus. The fraternity he helped lead in its infancy went on to formally incorporate in Maryland by 1968 and grow into a fully international organization with chapters across multiple continents.

Sources

1. Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc. official history; Alchetron