Stemons, Arizona Cleaver

Impact on the world

Co-founded Zeta Phi Beta Sorority at Howard University on January 16, 1920, after fellow student Charles Robert Samuel Taylor, a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, suggested while walking with her that she consider starting a formal sister organization to his own fraternity, an idea his fellow Sigma founder A. Langston Taylor, already profiled in this collection, also actively encouraged; Stemons became the new sorority's first chapter president and first national president, or Grand Basileus, making Zeta Phi Beta and Phi Beta Sigma the only constitutionally bound brother-sister pair among all historically Black Greek-letter organizations.

Life & background

Born Arizona Leedonia Cleaver in Pike County, Missouri in 1898 and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, where she was educated in the public schools and later returned to teach at her own former high school, Cleaver pursued graduate and post-graduate studies in social work at Howard University and the Pennsylvania School of Social Work. While a Howard student in 1920, encouraged by Phi Beta Sigma brothers Charles Taylor and A. Langston Taylor, who believed campus life would benefit from a sister organization to their fraternity, she joined four friends, Pearl Anna Neal, Myrtle Tyler, Viola Tyler, and Fannie Pettie, in founding Zeta Phi Beta despite two Black sororities already existing on Howard's campus; the five, known within the organization as 'the Five Pearls,' built the sorority around the principles of scholarship, service, sisterhood, and what they termed finer womanhood. Stemons served as the new organization's first chapter president and first Grand Basileus, going on to personally charter numerous undergraduate and graduate chapters nationwide, including Philadelphia's graduate chapter in 1944, and continued working as a social worker for Philadelphia's Department of Public Welfare and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children after 1933. She remained an active, popular speaker at sorority events into her seventies and was named the organization's president emerita, dying in 1980 at age 81; the Philadelphia chapter she founded still maintains her former home, the only Zeta Phi Beta property anywhere that belongs to one of its founders, and in 2019, marking the sorority's centennial, the city of Philadelphia renamed a street in her honor.

Sources

1. Zeta Phi Beta); Zeta Phi Beta Sorority official founders page; Zeta Phi Beta Commonwealth of PA chapter; Fran Becque (Fraternity History & More); Upsilon Mu Zeta chapter history