Today we honor “Pioneer”:
Brother Dr. Alphonse Heningburg was of the African American educational elite (a nationally known educator and lecturer). He was initiated into Alpha Nu Lambda in 1924 in Tuskegee, AL, and served as Chapter President. During his collegiate years, he received training at Tuskegee Institute and later Grinnell College where he graduated with high honors and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Cosmopolitan and Romance Language Club. He was one of two Black students to graduate. He received his Ph.D. from NYU in 1939 (dissertation: The Teacher in the Negro College). He traveled the world extensively, studying abroad in Europe to receive graduate work in Paris and a professor’s diploma from Sorbonne in Paris. He also learned to speak French, Spanish, and Italian. He was a former director of the Alabama Tuskegee Institute serving as the chairman of the Department of Romance Languages. Brother Heningburg later relocated to Durham, North Carolina in the 1930s to accept a position as assistant to the President of North Carolina College of President Dr. James Shepherd. He was also head of the Department of Education and very active in civic affairs and race relations in Durham. He did take leave to be a field secretary for the Dept. of Industrial Relations of the National Urban League. Brother Heningburg also went to Haiti for US AID and was an interpreter for the Moton Educational Commission to Haiti and received a commendation from the foreign and local press. He published an article in The Sphinx (Fall 1930: vol. 17) titled “What About Haiti?”. Brother Heningburg was secretary to the Department of Welfare of NYC and later joined the faculty of Yeshiva University School of Education and Community Administration to teach courses on social welfare.
Also, note that Brother Heningburg had two sons, Gustav Heningburg and Michael Heningburg, who were prominent in their rights. His son, Gustav Heningburg, was even tasked at one point in time with picking up peanut shells for George Washington Carver.
In 1944, he spoke to a Detroit institute on race and minority problems declaring “there can be no complete democracy until there is complete sharing of responsibility on one hand, and complete sharing of opportunity on the other.” Dr. Heningburg was the faculty advisor for the Audio-visual department at West Hempstead High School on Long Island for four years and was the only Ph.D. on our faculty. A former student considered him one of the most influential people they had ever known. In 1959, Dr. Heningburg was on a lecture series on Negro History with Dr. John H. Franklin and others for the Jamaica Branch of the NAACP. He was also a member of the American Teachers Association.
The depth of Brother Dr. Heningburg’s life was vast. He entered Omega Chapter on July 22, 1982, and is interred at the Evergreen Cemetery in Winston Salem, NC.