Here's a topic that I know is a cesspool of misinformation and paranoia from all over the spectrum (Henry Makow showing up at the top of some of my Google searches...) but I'm still interested in it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130101214 ... le-historyOriginally conceived as an organization that would contain the “best of Skull and Bones of Yale and of Phi Beta Kappa,” the fraternity stresses, as its founders stressed, family and the need for a social, spiritual and communal gathering space for Black professionals. The need, paradoxically, Calvin Pressley and others argue, is greater in 2004 than it was in 1904. Some of the members are second- and third-generation archons, but an increasing number, like the new leader, Charles Teamer, come from the ranks of high achievers with no previous family connections.
What makes the Boule’s success all the more interesting is that it was founded as a secret or quasi-secret organization and did not seek public notice until the 1960s and 1970s. Since that time, it has mounted a number of outreach programs, including a mentoring program, a public policy committee and a $200,000 scholarship program.
Called by some observers a super-fraternity because its membership includes the members of all major Black fraternities, Sigma Pi Phi, unlike other fraternities, does not have college chapters and only accepts members with a college degree and “a record of demonstrated excellence” in a chosen field.
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-07-18/ ... -black-menAs a young man living in Berkeley, Major recalled that he would catch occasional glimpses of older men in the community as they quietly left to attend their ritual monthly meetings.
"I saw these black professional men, doctors, judges, lawyers, put on their tuxedos every fourth Saturday and disappear," Major said. "I wanted to know what was going on."
He found out when he became one of the very few invited to join the group. He learned the secret handshakes and other Greek esoterica as he discovered that most of the black leaders in his community were already members.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1096679.htmlThe Washington Post
November 23, 1991 | Donald P. Baker
A secret weapon helping fund Gov. L. Douglas Wilder's campaign for president is his association with a handful of organizations, little known beyond middle-class black America, where the blue and white of Howard University is a more important school tie than the crimson of Harvard.
They include the Guardsmen, an exclusive social club to which no more than 30 black men can be admitted in any city; the Boule' (officially Sigma Phi Pi, the oldest of the black Greek letter organizations, whose members must be college graduates of distinction) and Omega Psi Phi, one of the eight historically black undergraduate fraternities and sororities.
Wilder, who joined the Boule' and the Guardsmen in the late 1960s and the Ques, as the Omegas are known, as an undergraduate at Virginia Union University here in the late 1940s, said their rosters often overlap.
“best of Skull and Bones of Yale and of Phi Beta Kappa” - this quote is actually found on the Sigma Pi Phi website's official history page.