04/12/2026
The University of Kansas let Black women pay tuition but wouldn't let them sleep in a dormitory. Alpha Kappa Alpha's answer was to buy a whole house in Lawrence and run it themselves.
They called it the Delta House. It stood for decades before the law caught up to what the sorority already knew.
The woman who named everything did not stay in Washington.
Beulah Elizabeth Burke was twenty-three years old when she sat in a room at Howard University in 1908 and suggested three Greek letters for an organization that did not yet exist. She proposed the colors, salmon pink and apple green, and offered the motto.
Nine women became the founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the first Greek-letter sorority for Black women in the history of this country. The one who gave it its name, its identity, its entire visual and spiritual language was Beulah Burke.
She could have stayed close to where it started, tending the original chapter, watching the organization grow from the city where it was born. Instead, she moved to Kansas City, took a teaching position at Sumner High School, and began carrying the sorority west, chapter by chapter, into territory where Black women were even more isolated than they had been at Howard.
The first chapter Burke helped establish in the Midwest was Delta, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The charter date was February 15, 1915, making it the fourth chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha overall and the first Black Greek-letter organization on the entire KU campus.
To understand what that meant, you have to understand Lawrence, Kansas, in 1915.
Lawrence liked to call itself a Free State city. It wore its abolitionist history like a badge, pointing back to Bleeding Kansas and the Border Wars, to the raid by Quantrill's guerrillas in 1863, to the fact that Kansas had entered the Union as a free state.
But freedom in Lawrence had always been a more complicated word than the monuments suggested. By 1915, Black residents knew the limits of that freedom intimately.
Segregation in Lawrence was not written into law. It was written into custom, which in some ways was harder to fight because there was no statute to challenge, no ordinance to overturn.
You simply knew which restaurants would not serve you, which barbershops would turn you away, which swimming pools were closed to your children. The University of Kansas reflected this perfectly.
Black students could enroll, could sit in lecture halls, could earn degrees. But they could not join ROTC, could not swim in the university pool, could not play on varsity athletic teams for years at a stretch.
They sat in a segregated section of the Kansas Union cafeteria, placed in the middle of the room, away from the windows and ventilation. After seven in the evening, when the Union closed, they were on their own.
A young boy named Langston Hughes was living in Lawrence during these years, being raised by his grandmother on Alabama Street. His grandmother wrapped him in a shawl that had belonged to her first husband, a man killed fighting alongside John Brown at Harpers Ferry.
Hughes would later write about growing up in Lawrence, about the merry-go-round he could not ride, about the amusement park that did not want him. His grandmother died in March 1915, one month after Delta Chapter was chartered.
The same town that was burying a woman whose family had fought to end slavery was also the town where Black women had just organized to claim space inside a university that treated them as guests in their own state.
The women who chartered Delta Chapter were not simply joining a sorority. They were building a structure for survival on a campus that offered them almost nothing.
There were no dormitories that would house them, no dining halls where they could eat without being reminded of their place. There were no social organizations that wanted them, no student government positions they could hold, no bands or glee clubs that would include them.
What there was, in February 1915, was a small group of Black women who decided they would create for themselves what the university refused to provide. The person who helped them do it was the same woman who had named the sorority seven years earlier, from a room at Howard University, a thousand miles east.
Burke did not charter Delta Chapter alone. The process involved the national leadership, and Nellie Quander, AKA's first president after incorporation, shared the vision for expansion beyond Washington.
But Burke was the one in the region, the one doing the organizing work. She understood what these young women at KU were facing because she was living in Kansas City and seeing the same system from the other side of the state line.
She had studied Latin, German, political science, chemistry, and physics at Howard, earning her bachelor's degree in 1908. She would later become one of the first Black women to earn a master's degree in home economics, from Columbia University.
She was a language teacher who ended up teaching home economics because her administrators decided that was more appropriate for a woman of her background. Even in her own career, the lines of what she was permitted to be were drawn by other people.
Burke chartered Beta Chapter at the University of Chicago and Gamma Chapter at the University of Illinois. Then she chartered Delta at the University of Kansas, the first three chapters outside of Washington, all established by the woman who had given the sorority its name.
She was planting something deliberately in the cities where the Great Migration was carrying Black families by the thousands. Black women were arriving at colleges and universities that did not know what to do with them and mostly chose to do nothing.
The year Delta Chapter received its charter was 1915, the same year that Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and Black people as threats to civilization. It premiered in Los Angeles in February, the same month Delta Chapter was chartered.
President Woodrow Wilson screened it at the White House and reportedly praised it.
By November, William Joseph Simmons had revived the Klan at a cross burning on Stone Mountain in Georgia, directly inspired by the film. The country was telling one story about Black people on the largest screens it had ever built while a handful of Black women in Lawrence, Kansas, were telling a different one with no screens at all.
The specifics of what those early Delta Chapter members faced at KU are documented in fragments, but the pattern is clear. Black students were excluded from virtually every corner of campus social life.
A 1914 letter from the Harvey brothers, two of the first Black athletes at KU, pleaded with the administration to end segregation in athletics. The university ignored them, and when they wrote again in 1921, nothing changed.
Housing was perhaps the cruelest exclusion. Black women at KU could not live in campus dormitories, so they had to find rooms in the small Black community of Lawrence, boarding with families, doubling up, making do.
This was not an oversight. It was policy enforced by custom, the same custom that governed everything else in the city.
And it was this specific wound that Alpha Kappa Alpha decided to address directly. The sorority purchased a house in Lawrence and called it the Delta House.
It was bought and financed by the sorority itself, not the university, to provide Black women attending KU with adequate and desirable housing. The Delta House was maintained by AKA members for decades, a physical structure that said what no administration would say, that these women deserved a place to live while they earned their degrees.
When open housing laws were finally passed, the need for the Delta House ended. But for the years it stood, it was one of the few things standing between Black women at KU and the full weight of their exclusion.
In 1929, a member of Delta Chapter named Hazel Browne was awarded Alpha Kappa Alpha's second Graduate Foreign Fellowship to study abroad. She went to Germany, where her instructors gave her their highest honors.
She later became the first Black woman to receive tenure as a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She had come through a chapter that was barely fourteen years old, on a campus that would not let her swim in its pool, and she went to Germany and outperformed everyone in the room.
By 1920, when Burke helped charter the Lambda Graduate chapter in Kansas City, Missouri, four of its charter members came directly from Delta Chapter at KU. The women who had been shaped by Lawrence carried what they learned into the next generation.
Another of AKA's original founders, Ethel Jones Mowbray, eventually settled in Kansas City, Kansas, where she became an active member of Mu Omega chapter until her death. Two of the nine women who had founded the sorority at Howard in 1908 spent significant parts of their lives in the Kansas City area.
The Midwest was not a footnote in AKA's history. It was the ground where the sorority proved it could survive beyond the campus where it was born.
The 1912 crisis had tested that survival. A group of undergraduate members at Howard had proposed changing AKA's name, colors, and symbols entirely, and when the dissenting members broke away and formed Delta Sigma Theta in January 1913, AKA was left smaller but intact.
Nellie Quander incorporated the sorority on January 30, 1913, securing its name and identity as a legal entity. Then she turned to Beulah Burke, the woman who had created that name, and asked her to help carry it forward.
Burke's answer was Delta Chapter, and Gamma, and Beta, and the graduate chapters that followed. Her answer was the Mid-Western Region, which she helped organize and served as its first Regional Director.
Her answer was a lifetime of work that took the three Greek letters she had proposed in a room at Howard and planted them across the plains, the prairies, and the Rocky Mountains. She died in 1975, having watched what she named grow for sixty-seven years.
The women of Delta Chapter did not make national headlines in 1915. No one erected monuments to what they did.
They organized in a town that celebrated its abolitionist past while enforcing segregation by custom. They studied on a campus that admitted them but would not house them, feed them comfortably, or let them participate fully in the life of the university.
They built a sorority chapter that became the first Black Greek organization at KU, and they did it in the same month that a film glorifying the Klan was premiering across the country. That is not a coincidence worth ignoring.
More than a century later, Delta Chapter still exists at the University of Kansas. It is still called Dynamic Delta, still the chapter that a founder of Alpha Kappa Alpha personally established, in a city where Langston Hughes learned what segregation felt like.
The name Beulah Burke proposed in 1908 has now been carried by more than 365,000 women across more than a thousand chapters in twelve countries. The colors she chose are still salmon pink and apple green.
And the first place she planted all of it outside of the East Coast was a university in Kansas that did not yet understand what it was receiving. She gave the sorority its name, and then she spent her life making sure the name went everywhere it was needed.
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Source: AKA national archives and regional histories, University of Kansas NPHC records, Beta Omega and Mu Omega chapter histories, KU Memorial Union historical documentation on segregation, Beulah Burke biographical records, Lawrence Journal-World historical coverage.
NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about the history of Black women's organizing in higher education, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.
