Simmons Elected to Prestigious African-American Sorority

Ruth J. Simmons, president of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., was recently inducted an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the first Greek letter organization in the United States for college-educated black women. Honorary membership is the organization's highest honor.

The first African-American woman to head a top-ranked college or university in the United States, Simmons has had a long and distinguished career in higher education, including service at Spelman College and a long tenure at Princeton University. She is widely recognized for revitalizing Princeton's Afro-American Studies Program, attracting leading African-American scholars, and establishing the program as a model for other colleges and universities.

In its citation for President Simmons, the sorority noted: "Ruth J. Simmons is a positive role model for women. She is patient yet forceful, reserved yet powerful. She is firm in her belief that an education is essential if we are to be competent leaders and contributors within our society. She is a woman of high ethical and moral standards and embodies the aims and ideals of our sacred sisterhood."

Other inductees at the ceremony, which was held in Chicago in July, included Emma C. Chappell, chairman and CEO of United Bank of Philadelphia; Brigadier General Rosetta Y. Burke, the first female assistant adjutant general of the Army National Guard; and Alice Coachman Davis, the first Black woman in the world to win an Olympic Gold medal.

Alpha Kappa Alpha members who are also college presidents include the leaders of Knoxville College, Knoxville, Tenn.; Paine College, Augusta, Ga.; Albany State University, Albany, Ga.; the University of Maryland, Salisbury; and Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, N.C.

Other notable members include Marian Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Mae Jemison, Coretta Scott King, Toni Morrison, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ntozake Shange.

Founded in 1908 at Howard University, AKA has a membership of 140,000 women around the world, in more than 860 graduate and undergraduate chapters. A service organization, it has organized support for historically black colleges and universities, job training, famine relief in Africa, sickle cell anemia research, anti-diptheria clinics, and civil rights advocacy.