Friendship is essential to the soul. Even without knowing the motto of Omega Psi Phi, a passerby of the Multipurpose Room on Saturday night would have inferred something along those lines from the booming laughter and plentiful applauses.
Omega Psi Phi held its 30th anniversary banquet in the Multipurpose Room on Saturday. Laughter, handshakes and brotherly embraces were happening without ceasing for the first half hour of the banquet, as current members and past alumni shared stories of the fraternity around the punch bowl.
“It was far more than a fraternity to me, it was a way of life,” said Edwin Osborne, one of the original founding fathers for the Tech chapter.
Omega Psi Phi has been an accredited black fraternity at Tech since their official establishment on March 10th 1978.
“We blazed the trail for all the other black organizations,” said Osborne.
Kenneth Cooke followed, “all the others were looking up to us as role models.”
Cooke was the first president of the Tech chapter.
Within its first years of establishment, the members of Omega Psi Phi decided that they were setting the stage for everyone else.
Benchmarks were something that the fraternity chose to set for all the other organizations on campus. Their goal was to raise more money than all the other organizations combined. They achieved that goal in 1979.
From 1978 to 1979, the fraternity obtained the highest overall GPA among all the other chapters across the nation. Again, in somewhat of competition with their fellow brothers, the Tech chapter won undergraduate chapter of the year twice from 1979 to 1980.
“I was there from the get-go, and I never imagined it would have lasted this long,” stated Mark Burnett, vice president of Student Affairs.
In the 30 years of being on campus, the founding fathers of the Tech chapter of Omega Psi Phi had just one phrase to encompass it all: we’ve come through a lot, and we’re here to stay.
