How I Confronted the Truth About My Fraternity’s Racist History

‘I was once a member of a white supremacist organization’ sounds clickbaitey, but is it untrue?

In March of 2019, a photo surfaced of three Ole Miss fraternity brothers posing with guns beside a bullet-riddled memorial to Emmett Till, the black teenager whose grisly 1955 murder was a flashpoint for the Civil Rights Movement. My stomach turned when I saw the picture, but I wasn’t surprised. Twenty-odd years ago, I was in the same fraternity.

Kappa Alpha Order was founded in Lexington, Virginia, just after the Civil War. Its early members declared themselves “Southern in our loves” and “Aryan by blood.” In 1923, the fraternity officially adopted Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder.” Until recently, many chapters held Old South celebrations that included marches through campus in Confederate uniforms and “plantation-style balls” to which guests came dressed in antebellum attire, the men sporting Rhett Butler-style cravats and the women in frilly dresses with hoop skirts.

The chapter I joined at James Madison University never celebrated Old South, and I never saw any Confederate flags. Most of my fraternity brothers were from the D.C. suburbs or points farther north. But we had the requisite oil painting of Lee in our…