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Here's an article written in the Plain Dealer about Grace White-Ware, daughter of our illustrious founder Madree Penn White

A lifetime devoted to Deltas

09/04/03

Margaret Bernstein
Plain Dealer Reporter

Grace White-Ware's world is limited now. At 81, she's blind in her left eye and can see only for a few hours a day through her right one.

It's a bit like being a has-been, says the retired Cleveland teacher who in her heyday was an outspoken voice within her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta.

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Today, her declining health keeps her from getting to sorority meetings. She spends her days inside a Cleveland home that's overgrown with Delta memorabilia saved from years of activism.

The boxes are dusty, but she's still a lusty warrior for Delta. That's clear when she barks at a reporter not to fail to put the word "Incorporated" after the sorority's name.

No one produces facts faster than White-Ware about the sorority's important role in history. She knows how Delta helped black women take their place in the civil-rights movement and how its founders even elbowed their way into a historic march for suffrage in 1913.

That's because her mother was there for all of it.

White-Ware enjoys the gilded position of being the daughter of Delta founder Madree Penn White, a name memorized by any college woman who wishes to pledge Delta.

It was her mom, perhaps more than any of Delta's 22 founders, who built a firm foundation for the sorority by writing its constitution and selecting its symbols. It was her mother who created the idea of spinning off chapters across the country, sowing seeds for an organization that 90 years later can brag that 200,000 college-educated black women have become members.

The national past presidents know White-Ware. Past president Hortense Canady recalls that during the 1980s, White-Ware fought bitterly against lowering the required grade-point average for prospective Deltas to 2.3 - a change the sorority eventually made and lived to regret, she said.

"What she predicted came true. We got a different caliber of young woman," said Canady, interviewed by phone at her Michigan home. "We were getting people who thought that hazing was more important than high morals and high principles."

It wasn't long before the sorority voted to raise the GPA back to 2.5, she said.

Canady, who served as national president from 1983 to 1988, said she respected White-Ware's strong opinions and put her to work directing national programs that had to do with social action.

As a frank-talking purist devoted to keeping her mother's vision intact, White-Ware often has tangled with sorority leaders. "They may not like me. But I don't give a hoot," she said with a laugh.

After all, she grew up holding the hand of a Delta founder who sought to build a national network of independent-minded black women.

Madree Penn White emerged as a leader in 1913, when 22 Howard University female students decided to invent their own Greek-letter organization. As the chapter's second president, she took over in the fall of 1913 and steered the sorority until 1919.

In 1914, White established Delta's second chapter at Wilberforce University. "Her whole concept was that a true sorority needed to have links nationwide," said Ella McNair, Delta's national director of programs and public relations.

White also had the idea to induct high-profile black women as honorary members to chart the sorority's political path. Among the notables selected were Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune, who helped push the sorority into a leadership position during the civil-rights movement.

After graduation, White married a physician, James White, and became a St. Louis newspaperwoman.

She always dressed plainly, in long skirts and a simple blouse. "My mother was very nondescript-looking. . . . But she was brainy," White-Ware said. "She always said there is no substitute for brains."

When her parents divorced, young Grace stayed with her mother and soaked up her philosophies. "No regurgitated thinking, please," she remembers her mother exhorting her. "Think for yourself."

But there was one glaring exception.

When Grace attended Harriet Beecher Stowe Teachers College in St. Louis in the 1940s and her friends pledged a rival sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho, she considered doing likewise. She didn't care for the Delta chapter on her campus. "All my friends were Sigmas. Every one of them. The Deltas liked the light-skinned ones, the damn-near-white ones, and I wasn't damn-near-white," she said.

The idea didn't go over well with mom, who threatened her daughter with bodily harm.

White-Ware changed her mind, pledging Delta in 1943. Eventually she came around to seeing the sorority as a rich inheritance.

In Cleveland, she became president of the local alumnae chapter, serving from 1969 to 1973.

Meticulous about facts, she donated some of her mother's memorabilia to the national headquarters and worked on a history committee.

White-Ware married a Cleveland man, James Ware, and moved here in 1954. They had a son, but it wasn't a happy marriage, and they divorced in 1957.

White-Ware never remarried - "One time was enough for me!" - and went on to earn a top reputation as a Cleveland public-schools teacher.

In 1955, her mother moved in with her and remained in Cleveland until her death in 1967. Jean Murrell Capers, Cleveland's first black councilwoman, struck up a close friendship with White-Ware's mother.

Joining Delta had been a very deliberate decision for Capers. She was impressed that the newly formed Delta chapter was the only black women's group to take part in the 1913 suffragettes march in Washington, D.C.

"At that particular time, that was no activity for a lady in which to be engaged," Capers said. To her, it was vivid proof that Delta Sigma Theta would be built on a social-action platform.

McNair pointed out that shortly after the 1913 march, nervy Madree Penn White even managed to snag a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson to argue for women's voting rights. She was only 18.

With an activist mom like that, "You can see why Grace is like she is," said McNair.

Many friends remark that White-Ware inherited her mother's vision.

Ironically, she now is sidelined by vision loss.

Because of an eye implant that allows her to eke out only a few hours of vision each day, White-Ware carefully chooses what she wants to see. Some days she lies in bed with eyes closed for hours, reserving her sight for a doctor's visit or for cooking.

Sorors and friends help out sometimes, she said. "But when you're 81, people forget all about you. I'm - what you say? - a has-been. But I don't feel like one."

She refuses to fade away. Instead, she works harder at maintaining her one last regular connection - contacting Deltas on their birthdays.

"Grace keeps up, she really does," says Warrensville Heights Mayor Marcia Fudge, who can count on a birthday card every Oct. 29. "It's just really wonderful that . . . even at her age and with her physical challenges, she always lets you know she's thinking about you."

Just because she's sending well wishes instead of launching tirades, don't assume her roar has dulled.

"Any card you get from me, you better frame," she said, with trademark sass. "Because I don't know what shape I'll be in next year."