With Faith in God and Heart and Mind

Approx. 376 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 11 halftones, notes, index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7319-6
Published: December 2024

Hardcover Available December 2024, but pre-order your copy today!

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Hardcover $29.95

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When Edgar A. Love, Oscar J. Cooper, Frank Coleman, and Ernest Everett Just founded the historically Black fraternity Omega Psi Phi on November 17, 1911, at Howard University, they could not have known how great of an impact their organization would have on American life. Over the 110 years that followed, its members led colleges and universities; served in prominent military roles; made innumerable contributions to education, civic society, science, and medicine; and at least one campaigned for the US presidency.

This book offers a comprehensive, authoritative history of the fraternity, emphasizing its vital role through multiple eras of the Black freedom struggle. The authors address both the individual work of its membership, which has included such figures as Carter G. Woodson, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, James L. Farmer Jr., Benjamin Elijah Mays, James Clyburn, Jesse Jackson, and Benjamin Crump, and the collective efforts of the fraternity's leadership to encourage its general membership to contribute to the struggle in concrete ways over the years. The result is a book that uniquely connects the 1910s with the present, showing the ongoing power of a Black fraternal organization to channel its members toward social reform.

About the Authors

Maurice J. Hobson is associate professor of Africana studies and historian at Georgia State University.
For more information about Maurice J. Hobson, visit the Author Page.

Eddie R. Cole is professor of education and history at UCLA and fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
For more information about Eddie R. Cole, visit the Author Page.

Jim C. Harper II is associate dean of the School of Graduate Studies and professor of history at North Carolina Central University.
For more information about Jim C. Harper, visit the Author Page.

Derrick P. Alridge is professor of education at the University of Virginia.

For more information about Derrick P. Alridge, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"This well-researched and engaging Omega history is long overdue. I learned so much from reading it—there is no higher compliment from one who has lived much of this history."—Congressman James E. Clyburn, member of Omega Psi Phi

"Far more than an institutional study, these pages bring to life the unrelenting pursuit of Black higher education and more than a century of commitment to full racial equality in America through the bond of brotherhood shared by all Omega men."—Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Harvard University

"A highly original analysis of Omega Psi Phi's commitment to coalition building with other social organizations and individuals that traverses an international and transnational landscape, brilliantly highlighting the ways in which the organization influenced and was influenced by Pan-African movements and maintained diasporic ties."—Richard McKinley Mizelle Jr., author of Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination