Famous Members:            Count Basie, Benjamin Hooks, Jesse Jackson, Vernon Jordan, Jr., Walter Washington

Incredibly, Omega Psi Phi brands its members during initiation.  Simulated branding is a common fraternity stunt: A pledge is told that he must take the fraternity’s brand.  He is blindfolded and a piece of ice is applied to his skin, often the genitals.  It’s all a big joke, and the pledge usually understands that.  Some fraternities brand with an iron placed in dry ice.  This is claimed to produce a temporary scar lasting about six months.

But on many campuses the Omega Psi Phi initiation includes real branding with a red-hot coathanger.  The Omegas, one of the oldest predominantly black fraternities in the country, were founded by students who failed other frats “paper-bag tests.”  (Some black fraternities used to reject rushees whose skin color was darker than a brown paper bag.)  Omega Psi Phi has 250 undergraduate chapters, and 80,000 initiates.  Not all chapters require branding, and the fraternity’s national headquarters claims to be appalled by it.  The branding iron is apparently made by straightening out a coathanger, the hook at the top becoming the Omega.  Pledges are branded on the bicep, leg or chest.  Sometimes the brand is a pair of intersecting omegas or an omega and a small Z.

Omegas are also known for beating pledges with switches and “food gorges,” in which pledges must eat without using their hands.  Some of the food is doused with Tabasco sauce.  Hence rival frat Kappa Alpha Psi song that goes: “If I have a low IQ, I’d pledge Omega too.”