About
Epsilon Beta Lambda was chartered in Macon in 1949, out of a chapter that had been seated two years earlier in Fort Valley.
In the autumn of 1947, Bro. Bennie Brown, General Secretary of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., came to Fort Valley, Georgia to establish an alumni chapter serving brothers living in Fort Valley, Macon, and the surrounding Middle Georgia area. The chapter was given the name Gamma Sigma Lambda.
Its founding brothers were:
Over the next two years more brothers established residence in each city, and it was felt that each locality could support a chapter of its own. A request went to the General Office asking that a second chapter be commissioned. In 1949 the original chapter remained in Fort Valley, and the new chapter in Macon was assigned the name Epsilon Beta Lambda.
Nine men became the founding brothers of Epsilon Beta Lambda:
The chapter marked its seventy-fifth anniversary with a gala that raised over $60,000 — its largest single fundraising effort — and with an exhibit of its own history at the historic Douglass Theatre in downtown Macon, where it drew considerable attention and remained on display for several months.
A dentist, an undertaker, a physician, an upholsterer, a postmaster, an educator, a community centre director, and two more.
Founding President, 1949
The chapter's first president, and a founding member of Macon's branch of the NAACP.
1893–1978. Initiated at Lincoln University through Nu Chapter in 1916. An elder at Washington Avenue Presbyterian Church for over fifty years. Two of his sons chartered the chapter alongside him.
Charter member
A dentist in Macon for forty-three years, and a captain in the United States Air Force.
1922–1995. Lincoln University and Nu Chapter, like his father and his brother, then Howard's School of Dentistry in 1947.
Charter member
Sole owner of Hutchings Funeral Home, and the first Black president of the Bibb County Board of Education.
1925–2000. A consensus broker through Macon's civil rights years, and the first Black chairman of the Macon Chamber of Commerce.
Charter member
A physician in Milledgeville for his whole career, and the son of one.
Born 1924 in Milledgeville. His father served the Black community through Jim Crow and often took payment in labor or produce. He followed him into medicine, graduating Meharry in 1948.
Charter member
Proprietor of Paul Duval and Sons Upholstery, the family business begun by his grandfather in 1883.
It started with a horse and wagon. He joined as a teenager, studied sociology at Johnson C. Smith, and ran the business with his sons until his death in 2002.
Charter member
Postmaster of Albany, Georgia, and later president of the Bibb County Board of Education.
1926–2015. Left Fort Valley State for the Navy in the Second World War and finished at Fisk in 1949. His was the first appointment of a Black postmaster since Henry McNeal Turner in Macon in 1869.
Charter member
Chartered Alpha Rho at Morehouse in 1924, then helped charter this chapter twenty-five years later.
1903–1958. Son of the first African American practising attorney in Macon. He was expelled from Talladega College for trying to establish a chapter of Alpha, and transferred to Morehouse — where the chapter he founded, on 5 January 1924, was Alpha Rho.
Charter member
Founding Director of the Booker T. Washington Community Center, for fifty years.
1907–1995. The centre was in Pleasant Hill, and he led it either side of war service. Dances, sport, drama, sewing, music and mentoring — a safe place in an unsafe time, and a place where dreams were not deferred.
Charter member
The first Black high school principal at Central High, and the first Black deputy superintendent of Bibb County Schools.
1925–2013. Morehouse at seventeen, then the Second World War and Korea, a Bronze Star, and forty-three years in education. The Robert J. Williams Educational Complex carries his name.
In 1978 the brothers bought the home of Dr. Reliford Stillmon Smith: three storeys, Italianate Renaissance, and reportedly designed by Ellamae Ellis League, one of Georgia's first female architects. It stood on what was then a stylish address for Macon's Black professional class — though under segregation every level of income lived on the same street.
Dr. Smith had not been able to get local financing when he built it. A California bank carried the loan, and he could not buy building material in Macon either, so it came in by rail. The records show the mortgage paid off in 1948. He was not an Alpha man at all: he belonged to the Lambda Phi Chapter of Omega Psi Phi.
The house became the chapter's centre of operations, and it housed the offices of Educational Talent Search, which the chapter founded that same year.
Six decades of the chapter's Debutante Cotillion Ball.
The Cotillion → About Chapter LeadershipThe officers of the chapter, and what each of them handles.
Chapter Leadership → About Fraternity History1906, Cornell, and the Seven Jewels.
Fraternity History → Membership ReactivationHowever long you have been away, the chapter would rather hear from you.
Reactivation →Scholarship cycles, Alpha Esquires, and what the chapter is doing in Middle Georgia. A few times a year, and never your details to anybody else.
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