With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity

by Maurice J. Hobson, Eddie R. Cole, Jim C. Harper, Derrick P. Alridge

Overview

When Edgar A. Love, Oscar J. Cooper, Frank Coleman, and Ernest Everett Just founded the historically Black fraternity Omega Psi Phi on November 17, 1911, at Howard University, they could not have known how great of an impact their organization would have on American life. Over the 110 years that followed, its members led colleges and universities; served in prominent military roles; made innumerable contributions to education, civic society, science, and medicine; and at least one campaigned for the US presidency.

This book offers a comprehensive, authoritative history of the fraternity, emphasizing its vital role through multiple eras of the Black freedom struggle. The authors address both the individual work of its membership, which has included such figures as Carter G. Woodson, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, James L. Farmer Jr., Benjamin Elijah Mays, James Clyburn, Jesse Jackson, and Benjamin Crump, and the collective efforts of the fraternity's leadership to encourage its general membership to contribute to the struggle in concrete ways over the years. The result is a book that uniquely connects the 1910s with the present, showing the ongoing power of a Black fraternal organization to channel its members toward social reform.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469673202
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	12/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376

About the Author

Maurice J. Hobson is associate professor of Africana studies and historian at Georgia State University.
Eddie R. Cole is associate professor of higher education and organizational change at UCLA.
Jim C. Harper is chair and professor of history at North Carolina Central University
Derrick P. Alridge is professor of education and an affiliate faculty member in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.
Jim C. Harper is chair and professor of history at North Carolina Central University.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This well-researched and engaging Omega history is long overdue. I learned so much from reading it—there is no higher compliment from one who has lived much of this history."—Congressman James E. Clyburn, member of Omega Psi Phi

Far more than an institutional study, these pages bring to life the unrelenting pursuit of Black higher education and more than a century of commitment to full racial equality in America through the bond of brotherhood shared by all Omega men."—Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Harvard University

A highly original analysis of Omega Psi Phi's commitment to coalition building with other social organizations and individuals that traverses an international and transnational landscape, brilliantly highlighting the ways in which the organization influenced and was influenced by Pan-African movements and maintained diasporic ties."—Richard McKinley Mizelle Jr., author of Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination