Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated is an international service organization that was founded on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1908. It is the oldest Greek-letter organization established by African-American college-educated women.
The moving spirit in the establishment of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. was Ethel Hedgeman Lyle, a native of St. Louis Missouri, and a member of the class of 1908 in Howard University’s Liberal Arts Program.Other founding members were Anna Easter Brown, Lillie Burke, Beulah E. Burke, Margaret Flagg-Holmes, Marjorie Hill, Lavinia Norman, Lucy Diggs Slowe, and Marie Woolfolk-Taylor.
Alpha Kappa Alpha is comprised of more than 265,000 members in 986 graduate and undergraduate chapters in the United States, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Caribbean, Canada, Japan, Germany, South Korea and on the continent of Africa.