Alpha Rho Chapter Alumni Association's Mid-Summer 2022 Digest
Our Mid-Summer Digest features updates on 23 Alumni Brothers from the Alpha Rho Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., along with administrative updates on team-building for Centennial 2024, and a re-cap of the West Coast Summer Smoker.
Brother Richard Sterling Moultrie, Jr. (Spring 1986) Appointed First Assistant U.S. Attorney
www.justice.gov
Northern District of Georgia U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan announced on June 15, 2022 that Richard Moultrie, Jr. had been promoted to First Assistant United States Attorney. U.S. Attorney Buchanan wrote in his announcement that: “Richard is a trusted advisor, a talented leader, and a prosecutor’s prosecutor. He has amassed nearly 30 years of experience, beginning with the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office and continuing with the Department of Justice via the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Georgia in 1996.
Richard joined our office family in 2007. He is a nationally-renowned expert on human trafficking prosecutions and he’s traveled the world giving trainings on human trafficking matters. He’s also a ‘must-see’ trial lawyer and a deserving member of the American College of Trial Lawyers.
Richard has received the Department’s highest honors, including the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award and the Director’s Award for Superior Performance.”
Pictured above: The Enigmatic 17 (Spring 1986) on the campus of Morehouse College during their pledge period. Brother Moultrie is shown at far left as the ACE of his line.
Washingtonian Magazine Recognizes Brother Frederick S. Humphries, Jr. (Fall 1980) On Their 2022 Roster Of Washington DC’s 500 Most Influential People Shaping Policy
www.washingtonian.com
For a long time, people have moved to Washington to change the world. Now more than ever, young people are eager to see improvements to our country, our climate, and our justice system. Unfortunately, polls have shown that many of those young advocates have little desire to serve in elected office. Well, there’s good news for them (and us): The nation’s capital is full of people who aren’t elected but who shape the laws that govern the country and ultimately affect the course of history. What follows is a list of 500 of those stalwarts.
Now with the company for two decades, Frederick Humphries, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, US Government Affairs, has long-held relationships throughout Washington that give him muscle on digital infrastructure issues and how they’ll affect the future job market.
This year, we expanded the roster from 250. We sought out smart, innovative people who care about issues and spend a lot of time thinking about them. They have deep subject-matter expertise and significant understanding of how DC works, with the goal of getting action. They comprehend policy’s nuances and complexities. And yes, they’re all wonks in one way or another.
Most are not boldface names. They work on matters many of us don’t follow daily—from making government run better to civil-rights reform. We’ve chosen people across the ideological spectrum, avoiding big-name “hired guns” whose influence often derives from their communication skills and network. We also didn’t include elected officials and Hill or administration staff—the “influencees,” so to speak.
Some names or companies may strike you as having a harmful effect. We’re not passing judgment on whether every person’s influence is for the greater good. We want to showcase those who wield it.
Pictured above: Fred Humphries, board member of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation and son of a college professor, works to get more students into computer science. (Washington Business Journal).
We tried to select policy areas that we felt the administration and the country are currently focusing on. For instance, we added two new categories: voting rights and trade policy. That gave us the chance to highlight people like CrowdStrike’s Dmitri Alperovitch, who’s bringing his global experience in security issues to a new policy think tank, and the National Urban League’s Joi O. Chaney, who’s leveraging her political expertise in the push for voting-rights protection.
Many of our choices have indeed served government in some capacity, like AEI’s Scott Gottlieb and Google’s Camille Stewart. We believe that the people we’ve included in this arena possess special insight into how to get an issue elevated. We also think some of the names here are likely to land in government in the future, either because of their ambition to serve or because they’ll be tapped for their expertise.
Every one of the influencers shares a drive to understand a policy issue and propel it forward. DC has always been a city of thinkers — we believe that’s a key attribute in making it such a special place.
For These Families, H.B.C.U.s Aren’t Just an Option. They’re a Tradition (Brother Tedd M. Alexander III -- Fall 1981)
America’s network of Black colleges were founded to provide essential opportunity. For many, they’ve come to offer something else: a link to a treasured legacy.
By Lise Funderburg www.nytimes.com
For Theodore “Tedd” Alexander III, 60, going to college was a given. For Mr. Alexander’s father, Theodore Alexander II, which college was also a done deal. “Son, you may go wherever you like,” Mr. Alexander remembers his father telling him. “But I’ll be sending the check to Morehouse.”
All-male Morehouse College, founded in 1867 in Atlanta, is one of the United States’ leading H.B.C.U.s, an acronym for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Morehouse is also where Mr. Alexander’s father and his father’s father had earned their degrees. Mr. Alexander followed suit, graduating in 1984, and has been an ardent supporter of the school ever since.
“It was the best decision I never made,” he joked.
Pictured above: Mr. Alexander’s grandfather (AP Fall 1929) and father (AP 1950) also graduated from Morehouse: T.M. Alexander Sr., left, class of 1923, and T.M. Alexander Jr., class of 1953. (Credit ... Larry Cook for The New York Times).
Now Mr. Alexander’s own sons — Theo (Class of ’17), Julian (’19) and Cameron (’23) — have kept the tradition going. They’ve been encouraged by both of their parents (their mother, Teri B. Alexander, graduated from Spelman College, an all-female H.B.C.U. across the street from Morehouse, in 1985), as well as by trips to Homecoming and, as needed, by repetitions of the family dictum on tuition destination. (That notion — that you can go where you like but the tuition will be sent to an H.B.C.U. — is not unique to the Alexanders.)
The H.B.C.U. designation, according to the federal government, requires that an institution be established before 1964 and that, in keeping with the Higher Education Act of 1965, its “principal mission” be the education of Black Americans. Among the 105 currently operating H.B.C.U.s there are a range of origin stories: Some were formed by missionary societies and farmers’ coalitions, others funded by land grants and Quaker philanthropists and oil barons.
All these institutions, though, were founded with a common purpose: to educate a population that routinely had been denied even the most rudimentary level of literacy (for fear, as an 1830 North Carolina law put it, that “the teaching of slaves to read and write has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce insurrection and rebellion”).
Students at any college who are the descendants of alumni are considered “legacy admissions,” according to Jasmine Harris, an associate professor of African American studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, whose research focuses on academic outcomes for underrepresented groups in higher education. But while the term “legacy admissions” is freighted by a history of cronyism and discrimination more generally, she said, that history does not apply to H.B.C.U.s.
The practice of giving formal or informal consideration to legacy applicants, Ms. Harris said, originated at elite, predominantly white schools as an instrument of ethnic exclusion. “While the policy is meant in its modern conception to support the familial connection that folks feel to these institutions, that wasn’t the initial premise,” she said. “Ivy Leagues were the first to institute legacy admission policies and that was specifically to keep out Jewish people and immigrants of all kinds.”
At Spelman College, while the application does ask about legacy connections, Chelsea Holley, the school’s director of admissions, said that no quantitative weight is attached to the answer. What legacy status can indicate, she said, is that the applicant is familiar with and drawn to the history and culture of Spelman. “When we talk about legacies in the African American community,” she said, “we’re still only one or two generations removed from people who only had access to a grade-school education. So this idea of privilege being passed down doesn’t ring the same for our schools.”
For these legacy families, an H.B.C.U. has become the school of choice for generations because these families believe the schools offer an essential, formative experience that will expand their children’s understanding of what it can mean to be Black in America.
Tedd Alexander III remembers feeling at home the moment he set foot on Morehouse’s campus as a freshman. “The entire spectrum of the Black experience was right there in front of me,” he said. His classmates hailed from various regional, social, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds but a collective identity transcended those differences.
His experience, he said, fortified him for life after college. “There’s no class called ‘How Do I Become a Successful Black Man in White America.’ That class isn’t taught,” he said. “And yet that is a part of what you leave with. I like to call it a coat of arms that allows me to go to a firm like T. Rowe Price and be very confident about what my capabilities are and why I’m there.”
Julian Alexander, 25, said that until he went to Morehouse he had never experienced a majority Black environment, other than in sports. “In my high school,” he said of the private, majority-white school he and his brothers attended, “you kind of felt like a number.” Morehouse, he said, invited him to thrive. “At Morehouse, when you get on campus, they say there’s a crown put over your head that you need to grow into. Morehouse definitely expects big things from us, and so we just try our best to grow into what we’re supposed to become.”
Brother Ralph M. Woolfolk IV (Spring 2007) Promoted to Captain of the Criminal Investigation Division (Special Enforcement Section) of the Atlanta Police Department
Always on call: Atlanta’s homicide detectives combat the city’s deadly surge.