In Washington, D.C., There was a picture of a judge challenging the results of his North Carolina Supreme Court race while he was in a college fraternity that praised the South before the Civil War. He was dressed in Confederate military gear and posing in front of a Confederate battle flag.
When the pictures came out, it was a tough time for Jefferson Gryphon, a Republican appellate judge who wants to be on North Carolina’s top court. Gryphon, 44, is getting more and more negative feedback, even from Republicans, as he tries to throw out more than 60,000 votes that were cast in last November’s election. Gryphon is still behind the Democratic leader by more than 700 votes, and the election is still not over.
This picture was obtained by The Associated Press. It shows Gryphon as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1999 to 2003. He was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order, which has tens of thousands of alumni and is one of the oldest and biggest fraternities in the U.S.
Gryphon said he felt bad putting on the Confederate outfit, which was the norm at the fraternity’s yearly “Old South” ball.
“Looking back, I went to a college fraternity event that wasn’t appropriate and doesn’t show who I am now,” Gryphon said in a statement. „At that time, like a lot of college students, I didn’t fully understand the bigger historical and social effects of that kind of involvement. Since then, I’ve learned, grown, and pledged my life to ideals that encourage everyone to be one and treat everyone with respect.
Gryphon and about twenty other fraternity members dressed in Confederate uniforms are shown in a shot from the 2001 ball. Griff and some other Kappa Alpha brothers are shown in another picture from the spring of 2000 standing in front of a big Confederate flag. In 2002, he was head of his group.
Fraternity in trouble
Over the years, Kappa Alpha has been at the centre of a lot of trouble, mostly because some of its members have done racist or hurtful things. A number of lawmakers have had to say sorry for putting on Confederate costumes at fraternity events or for being photographed with a Confederate flag.
Gryphon said on Friday that he voted for a resolution that said Kappa Alpha members couldn’t fly the rebel war flag at the group’s national convention in 2001. It wasn’t until almost ten years later, after Gryphon had finished, that the fraternity made it illegal to wear Confederate uniforms.
“We value cultural humility, we honour the good parts of our group’s history, and we push our members to work for a better future through education.” “These things are not incompatible,” said Jesse Lyons, a spokeswoman for the national office of Kappa Alpha in Lexington, Virginia.
The fraternity calls Robert E. Lee its “spiritual founder” and has long supported the Southern “Lost Cause.” This is a revisionist view of history that romanticises the Confederacy and sees the Civil War as a brave fight for “states’ rights” that has nothing to do with the enslavement of Black people. A lot of people thought that the name “klan” used by some Kappa Alpha chapters in the past was an obvious reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
Griffin’s pictures were taken at a time when many other Kappa Alpha chapters were thinking again about how they celebrated the Confederacy.
Gryphon was in a fraternity, and some people in his chapter didn’t think it was right to dress up in Confederate costumes for the ball. A person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation said Gryphon was against giving up the practice. The outfits didn’t change.
Gryphon said that he would “not respond to unchecked comments based on memories from more than 20 years ago.”
Gryphon also liked Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who led the south during the Civil War, when he was in high school. Gryphon said Lee would be on his “ideal guest list” for a party in a 1998 article about high school “scholars of the week” in The News & Observer of Raleigh.
Holding on to customs
KAPAPA was created in Virginia in 1865, not long after Lee gave up and surrendered to the Union Army. Lee was president of the college where the order was formed. At least one of the founding members used to be a rebel soldier who had fought under Lee. The fraternity looks up to Lee as the peak of Southern gentlemanliness.
Kappa Alpha has been having “Old South” parties for over one hundred years. There was a Confederate war flag flying over the events, and fraternity brothers dressed in grey uniforms that looked like real ones. Their dates wore hoop skirts that were popular in the antebellum era. They would sometimes ride horses through campus.
There were some Kappa Alpha chapters, mostly in the South, that stuck to their customs, like dressing up in blackface, even though it caused protests and public opinion changed.
In 1992, there was a “Old South” parade put on by Kappa Alpha at Auburn University in Alabama. People there waved Confederate war flags, and protesters burned them. The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported at the time that in 1995, Delta Kappa members at the University of Memphis swore racial slurs while beating a Black student who was making a scene outside of a frat party.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was also in a lot of trouble. The school’s Kappa Alpha chapter had to cancel its yearly “Sharecropper’s Ball” in 1985 because of pressure from other student groups. Some people had been dressing up as slaves to attend. A story in the Daily Tar Heel student newspaper said that members of the fraternity said they wore blackface because the event needed both black and white people to attend. They also said they would stop doing it.
Since 1987, members of the Kappa Alpha chapter at Wake Forest University in North Carolina have not been able to wear Confederate uniforms or fly the Confederate flag.
Some chapters went on longer, though. The University of Alabama Kappa Alpha members wore Confederate uniforms during a parade that stopped in front of a Black sorority, which caused a lot of backlash. That’s when the national offices told them they couldn’t do it anymore. It’s not clear if the UNC chapter banned the outfits before the national group did.
Critics say that public officials should not have ties to fraternities.
Gryphon is not the first public figure to get unpleasant attention for wearing symbols from the South’s darker past while they were in college.
Ralph Northam, the Democrat who was governor of Virginia at the time, faced harsh criticism in 2019 for a racist picture that showed up on his medical school yearbook page. Because of what happened, reporters looked into the college records of other Southern leaders. This made a number of lawmakers talk about their time as Kappa Alpha brothers in public.
In 2019, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, who was then the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, avoided questions about pictures of him wearing a Confederate outfit while he was at Millsaps College as a Kappa Alpha member in the early 1990s. Some members of the fraternity were kicked out for wearing afro wigs and Confederate battle flags and calling Black students racial slurs while Reeves was there in October 1994, according to the AP at the time.
Republican Henry McMaster, governor of South Carolina, wouldn’t say anything after yearbooks showed him as the head of the fraternity’s chapter at the University of South Carolina in 1969. The books also had pictures of members wearing Confederate costumes and posing with a rebel flag.
Also, Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said he felt bad about going to “Old South” parties when he was a student at Auburn University in the 1970s.
