Listen Live
St. Jude Give Monthly 2024
Praise 104.1
CLOSE

CRIMSON TIDE

The University of Alabama student senate killed a resolution supporting racial integration of fraternities and sororities on campus — a failure the legislation’s author partly blamed on a secret society called the Machine.

The student senate voted last week 27 to 5 to send the resolution to committee, effectively killing it. Thursday’s senate meeting was the last of the term, and no business will be carried into the new term.

“I submitted this in hopes that it would move the University of Alabama forward,” Katie Smith, the student senator who drafted the resolution, told The Huffington Post. “I am saddened that this is debated in the year 2014. However, as disheartening as it is to have an overwhelming amount of senators vote to ‘kill’ this resolution, I hope that our culture of silence is also ‘killed’ with their vote and that we can start a conversation about how to advance.”

The resolution cited damage to the reputation of the university, in Tuscaloosa, after it was revealed  last year that all white sororities were denying membership to black women based solely on race. The controversy erupted a half-century after National Guard troops forced then Gov. George Wallace to end his blockade at the university and the first black students were allowed to enroll.

Several black women were offered sorority bids in the fall after an arrangement with the university administration. In November, a historically Jewish sorority elected its first black president. But Smith said things are far from fixed when it comes to desegregating the Greek system at Alabama. She said she wanted to present the resolution in the fall, when race was a bigger public issue, but was pressured by members of the machine which student newspaper Crimson White has described as a political coalition of all-white fraternities and sororities. Smith said Machine members forced her to delay her resolution, telling her the Student Government Association didn’t want to take a stand on the issue.