Actor Hill Harper is supporting a new national partnership with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC),  Call to Service for St. Jude initiative, which launched earlier this month.

“NPHC organizations have deep roots in education and making a difference in the lives of our youth. Engaging this richly diverse membership through the Call to Service for St. Jude initiative will help raise awareness about St. Jude in the African-American community, while sharing the hospital’s mission of treating the world’s sickest children with the best care.”  Key messages: There’s still time for NPHC members, family and friends to support help St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital provide the best care to the world’s sickest children at no cost to their family by visiting stjude.org/nphc.

One reason this partnership is of such significance is because it is critical that we continue to educate communities about the importance of resources and treatment for pediatric cancer, sickle cell screening and treatment for the disease as well as research aimed at improving the quality of life for those living with sickle cell disease.  The NPHC is composed of historically African-American international Greek letter Sororities and Fraternities. Participating organizations include: Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc., Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc. Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. and Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

Jeff Tate, Vice President, Finance, Dow Performance Plastics has been named to Savoy Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential Blacks in Corporate America 2012 issue.

Savoy is geared toward African-American business professionals and profiles prominent African-American business leaders. With 100,000 readers per issue, the magazine serves as a premier forum for issues of workplace diversity and lifestyle features. Savoy notes the 2012 Top 100 issue is “one of the most definitive lists of African American achievers in Corporate America produced to date.” The magazine will be available on newsstands March 13, 2012.

In his role at Dow, Tate has responsibility for short- and long-term financial planning as well as accountability for developing and evaluating value-creating business strategies for Dow Performance Plastics, a $16 billion corporate Division of The Dow Chemical Company.

“We could not be more proud of Jeff for being recognized by this prestigious ranking,” said Bill Weideman, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of The Dow Chemical Company. “He is an exemplary team member who consistently drives financial discipline and pushes the team to strive for higher performance. His unique talents and passion for excellence are well-known, and this honor is further proof of his leadership both at Dow as well as in the community.”

In addition to this honor, Tate is also the recipient of the 2010 National Achievement in Industry Award from the National Association of Black Accountants (NABA). He serves as the National Co-Chair of the African American Network for Dow, an internal organization that unites and creates a community for the company’s African American employees. Tate earned his Bachelor’s degree in Accounting from the University of Alabama and is a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. He is a Certified Public Accountant and has held various Finance positions since joining Dow in 1992, including most recently as Finance Director of the Company’s Investor Relations group.

Tate was chosen for this honor from a pool of more than 500 candidates. Each candidate was selected based on criteria such as community influence and past achievements. The selection committee included Savoy’s editorial board, community leaders and representatives from the business and academic sectors.

“Can we choke you?” joked the self-defense instructor before asking the 25 seated girls whether they were up for a live demonstration of an attack.

This exchange took place Thursday night at Café 58 inside Irvine Auditorium, where students attended a self-defense workshop, designed to teach girls about public safety and how to respond in crisis situations.

The event, part of African-American interest fraternity Omega Psi Phi’s Women’s Appreciation Week, was organized by the fraternity, as well as Panhellenic Council chapter Zeta Tau Alpha.

The collaboration between a Multicultural Greek Council fraternity and a Panhel sorority is “something that we do not see very often,” according to College senior Tobi Abegunde, president of Omega Psi Phi.

Women’s Appreciation Week, an annual Omega Psi Phi event, began on Monday with a Women’s Spa Day, and ends with a speed dating event on Sunday.

Abegunde said that, while the event is not nationally mandated, the brothers decided to put it into place in 2010 because they “felt something was not right about the community we live in.”

“We personally feel that women on this campus are not appreciated,” Abegunde said. “Fraternities traditionally have a bad reputation of objectifying women, and this is our way of breaking that stereotype.”

Abegunde added that his fraternity was “probably the only fraternity on campus to organize a self-defense class for women.”

Omega Psi Phi is a city-wide fraternity, with brothers at schools like Villanova and Drexel universities. Two of the seven events during the week took place on Villanova’s campus, including the spa day, which was held in collaboration with King of Prussia Mall’s Bubbles Salon.

“We approached these businesses and told them what we wanted to do, and they volunteered to provide their services for free,” said College senior Jae Barchus, a brother at Omega Psi Phi and president of the MGC. One such organization volunteering its services for free is “Voices in Power,” a poetry group performing at Friday’s “For Her” performing arts night.

Although Women’s Appreciation Week is only two years old, turnout at each of the events has been promising, with around 50 girls attending spa day and 25 girls attending the self-defense workshop, according to Barchus.

“We have people telling us that they will write on their Facebook walls how much they appreciate what we are doing,” he said.

College senior Melanie Redfearn, who is judicial chair at ZTA, said the self-defense workshop was the first event she had attended of the week.

“I think this event allows women to slow down for a second instead of running from activity to activity, and really decompress,” she said.

Redfearn also found the week “especially relevant” to Penn’s campus.

“A lot of the events during Women’s Appreciation Week are associated with raising funds for assault victims and women’s centers,” she said. “Definitely an event like a self-defense workshop is important to an urban campus like ours, where crime is more frequent than we think.”

College sophomore Canaan Bethea, an Omega Psi Phi brother, said the responsibility of hosting the annual event this year largely fell onto the shoulders of younger brothers.

“We had a lot of fun showing women our appreciation,” Bethea said. “I think the ladies are definitely enjoying it, too.”

Earl G. Graves is a philanthropist, author, publisher and founder ofBlack Enterprise Magazine.

Earl G. Graves was born on January 9, 1935, in Brooklyn and raised in Bedford Stuyvesant, where he learned hard work and perseverance from his parents, Earl Goodwin and Winnaford Colette Sealy Graves.

Graves attended Morgan State University, where he became a member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics in 1958. After writing a letter to the Democratic National Committee, he became a volunteer for the 1964 presidential campaign of Lyndon B. Johnson.

His work with the party gave Graves the opportunity to serve as administrative assistant to newly elected Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1965. Following the assassination of the senator, Graves landed a seat on the advisory board of the Small Business Administration in 1968.

In 1970, he founded Black Enterprise Magazine–a business-service publication targeted to black professionals, executives, entrepreneurs and policy makers in the public and private sector.

It has been profitable since its tenth issue and yearly sales (currently over $53 million) are steadily increasing. BLACK ENTERPRISE has a paid circulation of 475,000 with a readership of more than 4.1 million. It is carried on board most major airlines, and can be found on newsstands nationwide.

In 1972, he was named one of the ten most outstanding minority businessmen in the country by the President of the United States, and received the National Award of Excellence in recognition of his achievements in minority business enterprise.

He is also listed in Who’s Who in America, and in 1974, was named one of Time Magazine’s “200 Future Leaders” of the country.

Graves served as a Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the U.S. Army from 1978 to 1980. He attended Airborne and Ranger School and finished his Army Career (in the rank of Captain) as a member to the 19th Special Forces Group, the Green Berets. He is also the recipient of the U.S. Army Commendation Award.

Earl G. Graves also served as Chairman and CEO of Pepsi-Cola of Washington, D.C., L.P., the largest minority-controlled Pepsi-Cola franchise in the United States. He acquired the $60 million franchise in July of 1990.

The company covers a franchise territory of over 400 square miles including Washington, D.C. and Prince George’s County, Maryland. At year-end 1998, he sold the franchise back to the parent company where he continues to be a significant stockholder and is Chairman of Pepsi’s Customer Advisory and Ethnic Marketing Committee.

In 1997, he authored a book entitled, “How to Succeed in Business Without Being White.” It chronicles the success strategies of America’s premier African-American businessman. Published by HarperBusiness Publications, the book made the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal Business Best Sellers lists.

The book was also selected as a finalist for the 1997 Financial Times/Booz-Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award.

In 2002, Graves was named by Fortune Magazine as one of the 50 most powerful and influential African Americans in corporate America. He also serves on the Board of Selectors of the American Institute for Public Service, the Advisory Council of the Character Education Partnership, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the National Advisory Board of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

In addition, Graves is a trustee of Howard University, the Committee for Economic Development, the Special Contributions Fund of the NAACP and the New York Economic Club.

During the span of his business and professional careers, Graves has received numerous awards and honors for his outstanding business leadership and community service, including (but not limited to) the Ronald H. Brown Leadership Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Dow Jones & Company Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence in 1992.

In 1999, he received the 84th NAACP Spingarn Medal, the highest achievement award for African Americans and was named one of the Top 100 Business News Luminaries of the Century by TJFR, a publication that covers business journalism.

In 1995, he was named New York City Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, and was also inducted into the National Sales Hall of Fame by the Association of Sales and Marketing Executives.

Graves is a member of the National Black College Hall of Fame and has received honorary degrees from 53 colleges and universities, including his alma mater.

Today, he continues to serve as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Earl G. Graves, Ltd., parent company for the Earl G. Graves Publishing Company, publisher of Black Enterprise Magazine

In his 50-year career span, Graves has become one of the most powerful and influential businessmen in the country and clearly a champion of community service and philanthropy.

Currently resides in Westchester County with his wife, Barbara, of 42 years. Mr. and Mrs. Graves have three married sons, all successful professionals who work in the family’s businesses.

Earl G. Graves, we acknolwedge your lifelong service to your community, and we honor your tireless efforts toward developing leadership in black businesses.

iPad/Tablet users, click HERE to download the magazine

They are the black men wearing royal purple and old gold who volunteer to deliver Friend-in-Deed meals to the poor of Springfield.

They help not-for-profit groups with fundraising. They participate in voter registration drives. And they mentor and provide scholarships to disadvantaged youth while enjoying the fellowship of other black men whose roads to college degrees and middle-class life may not have been smooth.

“We try to be a presence to encourage younger men,” said Roy Newman, a member of Springfield’s graduate chapter of Omega Psi Phi.

The black fraternity, headquartered in Decatur, Ga., celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. Current and past members include civil-rights activist Jesse Jackson, comedian Bill Cosby, poet Langston Hughes, radio talk-show host Tom Joyner, basketball star Shaquille O’Neal and astronaut Ronald McNair.

Founded in 1972

The Springfield chapter, founded in 1972, is one of eight graduate chapters of black fraternities and sororities in the city. The others are fraternities Phi Beta Sigma, Kappa Alpha Psi and Alpha Phi Alpha and sororities Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Zeta Phi Beta and Sigma Gamma Rho.

Several of the Omega chapter’s members said they are keenly aware of the influence they can have on young black males, as well as the positive image they can promote to the community amid negative statistics and stereotypes about black men nationally.

“We have the opportunity to give back,” said Newman, 46, a native of Ebenezer, Miss., who works as an Ameren account executive and is pastor of Fresh Visions Community Church.

The local chapter has 35 members, not all of whom were members of the fraternity when they were attending college. But all members must have four-year college degrees to join, according to chapter president Eddie G. Frazier.

Newman, who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Mississippi Valley State University and a master’s in ministry from Lincoln Christian University, joined after his college days.

He said the fraternity’s four “cardinal principles” are “manhood, scholarship, perseverance and uplift.” He said he wanted to be part of “a network of guys that believe in those principles and strive to accomplish them together.”

College degrees

The chapter members’ education level is unusual in Sangamon County, Illinois and the United States. Only 15 percent to 16 percent of black men 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher. White men in Sangamon County, in Illinois and nationwide are more than twice as likely to have earned at least a bachelor’s degree.

About 20 percent of black women locally and nationally also have at least a bachelor’s.

High incarceration and unemployment rates, low educational achievement and a variety of social ills create a “daunting future” for black boys and young men, according to the National Urban League’s 2007 “State of Black America” report.

“This state of underachievement, with its devastating and far-reaching ramifications, is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today,” Urban League president Marc Morial wrote in the report

Springfield’s Omega Psi Phi chapter, which includes men in their late 20s through their 70s, has become a family of sorts for some who didn’t have two parents at home during their childhood.

“I love the brotherhood,” said Doug Collins, 42, Lanphier High School’s girls basketball coach.

Collins, who grew up the only child of a single mother in Springfield’s old John Hay Homes public housing project, joined the fraternity after he graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts.

Focus on public service

Omega Psi Phi, like many graduate black fraternity and sorority chapters locally and nationally, focuses on public service.

Springfield Police Chief Robert Williams, a Springfield native, said he learned about the fraternity as a child from his physician, the late Dr. Edwin Lee, a founder of the Springfield chapter.

Williams, 48, a graduate of the University of Illinois Springfield and Benedictine University, said he joined the chapter for “the opportunity to serve and just to enhance and help the community as a whole.”

Collins said he tries to expose Lanphier students to successful African Americans by inviting black Greek letter organizations to Lanphier’s annual Orange and Black Alumni Fundraiser.

“I’m trying to decrease the students’ level of excuses,” Collins said. “Education brings opportunities, and it also gives you a chance in life. There is a better life.”

Frazier, 60, a civil engineer, added: “We say, ‘You can make it. I don’t care what kind of household you came from.’”

The fraternity’s projects include g an annual community picnic, providing scholarships to aspiring high school students, and giving school supplies to needy children.

Newman said chapter members mentor young people whenever possible. He said he and other members are grateful for the help they received when they were younger.

“You want to give back to the community,” he said. “I came from a large family in a rural area in the South, and so certainly people helped me get through school.”

The chapter’s activities can improve the public image of black men, Williams said.

“Overall, it changes perceptions,” he said.

Edmund Lewis measured about a dozen young men for shirts and gave them donated ties. While he took measurements and tied ties, the 25-year-old Detroiter talked about college.

“I want them to know you don’t have to be sagging to be cool,” Lewis said after a meeting at Community High School in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood. “There are brothers with their pants pulled up wearing ties, and they’re still cool.”

For Lewis, the tie-and-talk session was more than idle chatter.

When he was a high school senior in rural North Carolina, Lewis met a man who helped him forge a path to success. Without that man, Lewis, who has a master’s degree in social work from the University of Michigan, says he could have easily been another statistic.

African-American men remain twice as likely as white men to be unemployed, three times as likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be incarcerated, according to a 2009 National Urban League report.

Lewis works as a community support person, coordinating services for the Brightmoor Alliance, a consortium that works to improve the lives of neighborhood residents. That work led him to volunteering at Community High School, where he is trying to keep the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alive by encouraging success among the young men there.

“I appreciate what he’s doing,” said Eduardo Marshall, 17, a senior at Community High. “He wants to change the image of black dudes, you know, the hoodies and sagging pants.”

U-M grad works to expose young men to a better life, then help them achieve it

Edmund Lewis never gave any thought to going to college.

Growing up, his grades were mediocre. Mostly, he hung out with friends, acting as if he didn’t care about anything. He ran track for his high school team in rural North Carolina.

That’s what young black boys did, he thought, never having had a father figure to talk with about what he could — and should — aspire to do.

Then one day during his senior year, a man who volunteered at his school stopped him and asked about his plans after high school.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” was Lewis’ response.

But he did care, and the man, Gregory Lee, knew it.

Lee told Lewis that he ought to go to college. And Lee went further: He helped Lewis fill out applications and apply for scholarships and paid the application fees.

“He basically took away every reason I had for saying no,” Lewis said.

Four years later, Lewis graduated with honors from North Carolina Central University. In 2009, he received a master’s degree in social work from the University of Michigan.

Since then, Lewis moved to Detroit and vowed to pay Lee back by giving back — following in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He works as a community support specialist, coordinating services and programs through the Brightmoor Alliance, on Detroit’s west side.

Since last year, he has spent hours volunteering at Community High School.

He recently formalized his volunteer efforts by creating a nonprofit called Minority Males for Higher Education. The intent of the initiative is to ensure that young black men have all the resources they need to get into college and be successful once there.

“There were so many things I didn’t know, that can make you uncomfortable in a professional setting,” Lewis said.

The group will teach young men such things as dressing for success and dining etiquette. In addition to visiting college campuses, the young men will attend plays and other programs to broaden their experiences.

The need is great. In Detroit, only 7% of black men ages 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to 2010 U.S. Census data. But Lewis didn’t need statistics to know the need.

“When I got to college, I realized I was one of a very select group of black males to go,” he said.

Being there made him hunger for a better life.

“You can’t envision anything else if you don’t see anything else,” Lewis said.

During college, he went on a civil rights tour that took him to the Edmund Pettis Bridge, the site of the attack on people marching peacefully for civil rights from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, Ala. One of the marches was led by King.

Lewis began to see getting an education not as a personal feat but as a community necessity — a way to not only say thank-you to Lee, but to men and women before him who had sacrificed to create opportunities for him and others.

During his college years, he began volunteering and joining and becoming a leader in such organizations as 100 Black Men and Omega Psi Phi fraternity.

His grades and community service work earned him a full-tuition scholarship to U-M and led to a fellowship from the Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation. The fellowship included an internship that introduced him to Brightmoor neighborhood in Detroit and Community High School.

He also volunteers at the school.

“He’s up here so much, it’s almost like he’s on staff,” said principal Aaron Williams. “He mentors our young people, helps them with college applications. He has even attended our parent-teacher conferences. He has a tremendous heart for young people. He and I share the same passion for helping young men, in particular. We know that keeping them on track in terms of getting an education can take them away from a life of crime. There’s an unspoken culture that says all we do is rob, steal and kill. We know that’s not true.”

The youngsters he works with expressed appreciation during a meeting at which he measured them for dress shirts and gave away coats and ties donated by members of his fraternity.

Aaaqi Peterson, 18, a senior, plans to go to North Carolina Central, just as Lewis did.

“His whole speech moves me to try harder and go farther,” said Peterson, who wants to study business and music.

Emmanuel Whitley, 16, a junior, said Lewis built up his self-confidence.

“I didn’t believe in myself,” Whitley said. “Now I work harder in school, and I want to be a computer engineer.”

Khari Greene, 17, also a senior, said the men can relate to Lewis because his background is similar to theirs. “It’s just good for a man who doesn’t even know us to start talking to us and saying he’ll help us get to where we want to be.”

President Barack Obama has a new, moneyed supporter in this new year — a super PAC dedicated to mobilizing black voters in key swing states.

Calling itself 1911 United, the super PAC is aiming to raise $1.5 million during the election cycle and train its efforts on Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, committee treasurer Sinclair Skinner told POLITICO.

“He needs a boost,” Skinner said of Obama. “And we want to use all the means possible to support him, including a super PAC. Black political participation is still evolving, and what we hope to do is get as many voters active in the process as early as possible.”

The committee is backed by two large, historically black fraternities, Kappa Alpha Psi and Omega Psi Phi, both of which celebrated their centennials last year.

The 1911 United super PAC will likely work to “organize and deploy” black voters — particularly potential first-time voters — in support of Obama, said Skinner, a long-time Washington, D.C.-based political organizer who’s a mechanical engineer by trade. He notes that the group intends to make significant use of phone banking and social media to achieve this goal.

Broadcast media messages are a possibility, but “we’re really going to focus on working with the people directly,” he said.

Super PACs, formally known as independent expenditure-only committees, may raise and spend unlimited sums of money in support of, or in opposition to political candidates, so long as they don’t directly coordinate with campaigns.

These committees have become major forces in the 2012 presidential election, with numerous super PACs spending millions of dollars to promote and attack Republican presidential candidates in early caucus and primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. Many of them are run by the presidential candidates’ former staffers, and thanks to loopholes in election law, they’ve largely avoided disclosing their funders ahead of early primary and caucus contests.

This is the first presidential election in which super PACs have existed. They sprung into existence following a pair of 2010 federal court decisions, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, which prompted their legality.

To date, Priorities USA Action, run by a pair of Obama’s former White House aides, is the largest super PAC to back the president during his re-election bid. Almost all of its more than $306,000 in expenditures so far this election cycle have gone toward attacking Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

In the wake of a college drum major’s death in Florida, a lawmaker from the state plans to introduce anti-hazing legislation when Congress returns in mid-January.

The bill would strip financial aid from anyone sanctioned by a university for hazing or witnessing hazing and failing to report it – including the victim, said Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson.

“Hazing is demeaning, dangerous and, sadly, deadly,” Wilson, a former school principal, told the Los Angeles Times, adding that the death of Florida A&M University drum major Robert Champion warrants a federal response.

Florida has toughened the penalties against hazing, but Wilson said in an interview that, under her proposal, if anyone witnesses hazing – “including the victim, they will tell because they don’t want to lose their federal aid.”

Florida officials have ruled Champion’s death in November a homicide. The incident has drawn national attention and generated soul-searching on college campuses throughout the country.

Wilson, who has yet to draft the legislation, said she also wants the U.S. attorney general to set up a commission to examine ways to stamp out hazing.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in 2005 signed legislation making hazing that results in serious injury or death a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, even if the victim consents. The bill, the Chad Meredith Act, was named after a University of Miami freshman who drowned in a campus lake while trying to join a fraternity in 2001.

Wilson said that, notwithstanding the new law, “we have had a plethora of hazing incidents,” but prosecutions have been difficult because “you can’t find any victims to talk.”

“We’ve got to take a tougher stance,” added Wilson, who said that she became known as the “haze buster” while serving as South Atlantic regional director for the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. “It’s time to stop it.”

Congress has been considering legislation aimed at bullying, including requiring states to report bulling incidents and expanding programs for teachers, administrators and counselors on strategies to prevent bullying and harassment.

In November 2010, I watched “HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” and saw a piece on the hazing antics at several historically black colleges and fraternities. I took to Twitter to share my thoughts on the issue.

Much of the report focused on Southern University, and man, did the floodgates open as a number of students from the university angrily tweeted me back, cussing, yelling and screaming, with some defending hazing, while others were angry at the national attention focused on their university.

For hours we went round and round, and were joined in the discussion by members of several black fraternities, including my own Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. A number of these individuals actually supported hazing, or “pledging hard” and not becoming a “paper” member who “skated” into the fraternity.

Despite the anger and vitriol, I refused to back down, making it clear that getting beaten for being in a band or fraternity was absolutely dumb.

Here was a young man who went off to college, planning to earn a college degree while leading one of the nation’s most colorful and exciting bands, only to be returned home to his parents in Georgia in a coffin.

While hazing immediately was suspected, we could only speculate about the cause of the 26-year-old’s death. That is, until Friday, when the medical examiner released details of his autopsy, concluding that Champion “collapsed and died within an hour of a hazing incident during which he suffered multiple blunt trauma blows to his body.”

News of the death has rocked the Florida A&M campus, angering its students and alumni, triggering multiple state investigations and leading Gov. Rick Scott to call for the suspension of school President James Ammons. That prompted FAMU students to march to the governor’s mansion on Friday and camp out on his lawn, demanding he rescind the resignation call.

Champion’s death isn’t the first time we have seen individuals in a band or fraternity die. It is incredible that some folks have given their lives — literally — for just being a part of a student group.

State laws have been passed, organizations have been kicked off campuses and national fraternal and sorority groups have paid millions in settlements because of hazing, but we continue to see these stories.

“Why?” is a consistent question that is asked, and at the end of the day, it boils down to power and a desire to demand others kowtow to someone else’s demands in order for them to be accepted.

A decision not to follow through means you can be ostracized, ignored and marginalized. That’s the last thing any young person wants to experience when in an organization.

Every one of these organizations is overseen by adult leaders or advisers. But in truth, fellow students run the show. Normally in a band, a drum major sits at the top of the food chain, but Champion clearly had to bend to the band’s culture to be fully accepted as a member of FAMU’s “Marching 100.”

So what you have is a bunch of students between the ages of 18 and 22 calling the shots and making it clear who is accepted and who isn’t, who gets in and who doesn’t. You aim to please them and no one else. Oftentimes they are leading based on how they were led, and it has been indoctrinated into them that this is the way of life, take it or leave it.

These are powerful forces that can only be changed by peers. Hazing will only be brought to a close when members of organizations make it clear the vile hazing traditions will not go forward. No one today can be hazed if the student leaders make it clear that it’s unacceptable. Yet because of the natural turnover in student organizations, that mindset has to be created and passed on for it to succeed.

When I was about to pledge Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. in spring 1989, I met with my four other pledge brothers and made it clear: I’m not getting hit, I will never use alcohol and I will not agree to be hazed.

Even though my older brother pledged the same fraternity at Texas A&M two years earlier without any nonsense, I was making it clear that such shenanigans were idiotic. All five of us agreed and in the four weeks, two days, 16 hours, 38 minutes and 39 seconds I was on line (yea, having to recite such specifics was a part of our process), the behavior that we often heard was associated with pledging didn’t exist.

Yet because of that, we weren’t always as accepted by other fraternity members at other campuses. Our chapter was called soft; we were criticized as not “pledging the right way” and had to constantly defend our manhood.

Me, I didn’t give a damn. I would look others in the eye and say, “In the history of our chapter, only one brother has failed to graduate, and we do nothing with him. Are you guys on the six- or seven-year plan, and can you match our graduate rate?”

From my perspective, we were supposed to be in college to graduate, not to pledge. And if my fraternity was founded as a study group at Cornell University on December 4, 1906, why would we eschew academics?

Even though we pledged the right way at Texas A&M, that peer pressure was still unbearable for some. That summer at our national convention in San Antonio, hazing was on the agenda, and I made it clear I was going to speak. Some other brothers in my chapter pulled my coattails and said, “Don’t tell the brothers you didn’t take any wood (that’s being paddled).”

I yelled, “If we pledged brothers the right way, why in the hell are we afraid to say it?”

Since those days, I’ve never wavered from my anti-hazing position. It is deplorable and shameful to think that someone would beat another person for them to prove something. Prove what? They can take a punch? No. I prefer to challenge his mind, his intellect.

Our goal as fraternity men is to take young men and mold and shape them to be better men. It is not our aim to take young men and train them to be collegiate mercenaries, hellbent on inflicting as much pain as they got onto the first person they have control over.

Is there tremendous value in fraternities, sororities, bands and student organizations? Absolutely. The leadership opportunities are tremendous, and the lifelong relationships are vital.

But what has to be preached and preached and preached to every student, whether they are white, black, Asian, Latino, male or female, is that if they love that frat, sorority, drill team or band, they shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize it for the next person.

Do we need tougher hazing laws? Yes. Do we need universities to take punitive action, including kicking students out who break the rules? Yes. Do we need national organizations to ban chapters for years for egregious behavior? Absolutely. Should fellow student leaders turn in others who break the rules and haze? Of course. There must be a zero tolerance attitude from every state official, administrator, student leader and organization member. To hell with tradition, rituals and “the way we do things.” All that must end. Now.

But we also must raise a generation of young people who have enough confidence in themselves to say, “I will not take a beating just to be accepted by you. I’d rather not have your affection or support if it means putting my life on the line.”

And if that means other students calling you out or teasing you, fine. I’d rather you talk about me like a dog today than be hazed and have my friends search to figure out what to say at my funeral.