When Candace Junée was a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, she walked into a dark, candlelit room and knelt on a pillow as she prepared to join Alpha Kappa Alpha, the world’s oldest Black Greek-letter sorority.
She recited the sorority’s oath along with other soon-to-be initiates, signed her name, and the secret ritual was over. Junée was excited. She had joined a distinguished legacy of “pretty girls” in pink and green whose history stretched back to 1908, with Wanda Sykes and Toni Morrison among AKA’s notable members. But she also felt uneasy as she looked around at her line sisters. She remembers thinking, “What did we just do?”
Junée didn’t think much about the ceremony until a year after she graduated, in 2015, when she joined a new church and heard members say Christians shouldn’t belong to Black sororities and fraternities like hers. Already inactive in her sorority’s activities, she told The Washington Post, she revoked her membership privately through prayer. Then last year, after some of Junée’s acquaintances told her God wanted her to leave AKA permanently, she posted videos on YouTube and TikTok calling the rituals she went through “openly demonic” and the sorority a breeding ground for “idolatry.”
“God literally showed me that there were so many demonic open doors in my life with things that I was struggling with in the spiritual world that were open doors because of this organization,” Junée said in her TikTok video, which was viewed 1.7 million times.
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She is part of a growing number of people who have publicly denounced their affiliation with a group of the largest historically Black sororities and fraternities, the National Pan-Hellenic Council or “Divine Nine.” There are hundreds of videos in the same vein as Junée’s, either condemning the groups as anti-Christian and paganist, or defending them from those accusations.
Renouncements go back decades in Black Greek-life communities, but public denouncements of the groups have become especially prominent on social media, where confessional-type videos crop up regularly with massive audiences. The phenomenon has riled many of the Divine Nine’s 2.7 million members and drawn criticism from prominent group members who view many of the denouncers as misinformed, distracting from the work Black fraternities and sororities have done in their communities.
“When we talk about a lifetime commitment in Delta, well, that doesn’t mean it’s a blood signature. That doesn’t mean we bow down to gods,” said Shavon Arline-Bradley, an associate minister at Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va., and a member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority for 26 years. “Those are words that we use to affirm that we’re committed in public service to a sisterhood.”
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Delta’s international president Elsie Cooke-Holmes told The Post that less than 1 percent of its members choose to leave, and that the sorority “will not be distracted from our audacious social justice and civil rights agenda, especially in a consequential election year — where our democracy hangs in the balance.”
The NPHC declined to comment on the denunciations, and The Post did not receive a response from the top leadership of eight of the nine organizations: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority and Iota Phi Theta Fraternity.
Black Greek-letter organizations formed in the 20th century as havens of sisterhood and brotherhood for college students who were generally discriminated against and barred from joining existing sororities and fraternities. The groups continue to be fixtures in Black culture, holding fundraisers, voter registration drives and stepping and strolling performances. “Crossing” into one of the organizations through a mix of public and secretive rituals has facilitated lifelong career connections and friendships, and a sense of connection to famous Divine Nine members such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who pledged to Alpha Phi Alpha and Vice President Harris, an AKA.
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It’s unclear how much the relatively high rate of religiosity among Black Americans, as found by the Pew Research Center, has to do with the denunciations, which have appeared online for at least a decade and spread by word-of-mouth before the internet. All of the Divine Nine groups have Christian clergy members, such as Arline-Bradley, who considers the groups “biblically based” but not religious.
Porchia Carter, 30, a New York City-based content creator who has written a book on leaving fraternities and sororities, said her research suggested otherwise.
She said she was initially very close to her line sisters in Delta Sigma Theta’s chapter at Tennessee State University, despite traumatic hazing she says included having ice-cold buckets of water poured on her while a stun gun was held close to her nose. But she said in 2020, while fasting and praying, she began having wild dreams in which she was being attacked by demons and spirits. When she decided to research her dreams, she stumbled across YouTube videos on evil covenants and secret societies.
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Carter concluded that when she knelt at an altar and vowed to be a Delta years ago, she entered a binding agreement with Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom that’s a guiding symbol for the sorority. In 2022, she had three dreams she believes were from God telling her to publicly denounce Delta on the eight-year anniversary of her joining.
“It’s all demonic, and it’s covered up and ‘founded on Christian principles,'” she said in her 43-minute denunciation video that year, which has been viewed more than 200,000 times on YouTube.
Lawrence Ross, who coined the phrase “Divine Nine” and wrote a book on its history, became an Alpha Phi Alpha member at the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. He remembers that some students would leave after joining Bible studies in which their involvement in the fraternity was questioned.
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The grandson of a minister and the immediate past president of Alpha Phi Alpha’s Inglewood, Calif., chapter, Ross said public denunciations have the “intellectual nutritional value of a Snicker[s] bar.”
“We live in an age where we’re looking for quick bursts of notoriety,” he said. “It really does feel a little bit narcissistic in terms of how this is manifesting itself in terms of the public facing, ‘I’m doing this thing.’ … which in its essence tells me that the person really shouldn’t have been a member of the organization in the first place.”
Kevon Ravenell, a New York-based content creator and social media editor who joined AKA in 2015, said she used to dismiss people who denounced their Black Greek organization. But in 2020, shortly after becoming a Christian, she clicked on a denouncement video that appeared on her YouTube recommended page which argued that the pink binder she received with AKA’s rules, regulations and pledges was co-opting scripture verses.
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The video left her in tears. After more praying, fasting and reading, she recalled, she phoned AKA headquarters to leave. In 2021, she made a multipart TikTok series detailing her experience, which collectively earned more than 300,000 views.
“I was so bold when I joined. I was excited, I posted everywhere, everything in pink and green,” she said. “So why can’t I be that bold with me stepping back?”
