Sigma Alpha Epsilon was born not long before the Confederacy itself, deep in the heart of Dixie. A small band of brothers founded SAE on March 9, 1856, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
According to SAE, “Founded in a time of intense sectional feeling, Sigma Alpha Epsilon confined its growth to the Southern states.” It is the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South.
Of fewer than 400 members when the Civil War began in 1861, 369 fought for the Confederacy and seven for the Union. Seventy-four SAE brothers died in the war.
The fraternity held its Southern heritage close. “We came up from Dixie land,” reads a ditty from an old SAE songbook.
But nearly 160 years later, another song—this one chanted by members of the frat’s University of Oklahoma chapter and containing racial slurs and lynching references—hearkens back to the land of cotton and puts a new spotlight on the group’s history.
