Seven women founded Sigma Gamma Rho at Butler University in 1922, and in the century since, the Sorority has grown into a roster of more than 100,000 members. Among them are an Academy Award winning actress, a first solo female rapper to release an album, a Pulitzer-track sociologist, a co-founder of the National PTA, the first Black public county librarian in Florida, and a long line of singers, scholars, and educators who carried royal blue and gold into rooms that had rarely seen them before.
This guide walks through the SGRhos who built the Sorority’s identity in two of the fields the founders cared about most: entertainment and education. Some are honorary members. Some are line sisters from the Alpha chapter. All of them moved the culture.
A Quick Note on the Seven Pearls
Every SGRho member traces her lineage back to seven Black women educators in Indianapolis on November 12, 1922. Mary Lou Allison Gardner Little, the primary founder, was a classroom teacher, and so were her six sisters in founding. The Sorority was a professional organization for schoolteachers before it was anything else, which is why the education section of any Famous SGRhos list runs as deep as the entertainment one. The founders set the standard, and the women below extended it across the Divine Nine and beyond.
SGRhos Who Defined Entertainment
Hattie McDaniel
In 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American actress to win an Academy Award, recognized for her supporting role in Gone With the Wind in 1939. Her name still anchors any conversation about Black women in Hollywood, the same lane the famous AKAs occupy with Phylicia Rashad and Ava DuVernay. Her membership gives Sigma Gamma Rho a direct claim to the first Black Oscar winner.
MC Lyte
MC Lyte made history as the first solo female rapper to release a full album, dropping Lyte as a Rock in 1988. Her catalog and her work as a moderator and broadcaster set the template that every solo woman rapper that followed has had to reckon with, and her honorary membership made hip-hop a permanent part of the SGRho story.
Martha Reeves
Reeves was the lead singer of Martha and the Vandellas, the Motown group behind Dancing in the Street and Heat Wave. Her voice defined a stretch of 1960s pop and made Detroit Motown a name in households that had never heard of Sigma Gamma Rho. She remains one of the most cited names whenever the Sorority lists its musical lineage.
Victoria Rowell
Rowell is an actress and screenwriter best known for The Young and the Restless and Diagnosis Murder. She has also written about her time in the foster care system and has used her platform to advocate for foster youth. Her work places SGRho inside the soap opera canon as well as inside the activist memoir tradition.
Deshauna Barber
Barber was crowned Miss USA in 2016 while serving as a U.S. Army Reserve captain, a dual identity that made her one of the most visible SGRhos of the decade. She was initiated through the Alpha Zeta chapter and has spent her post-pageant career as a motivational speaker and advocate for veterans and women in service.
Voices in Music and the Arts
Kelly Price. Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, and actress whose discography includes Mirror Mirror and Soul of a Woman. Price is an honorary SGRho and one of the names that most often answers the question of which sorority Kelly Price is in.
Marilyn McCoo. Grammy-winning lead singer of the 5th Dimension, the group behind Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In and Up, Up and Away. McCoo’s late 1960s and early 1970s catalog put SGRho on the variety-show circuit alongside every major act of the era.
Vanessa Bell Armstrong. Four-time Grammy-nominated gospel artist whose career stretches from So Good to The Truth About Christmas. Her membership ties SGRho to the gospel music industry in the same way McDaniel ties it to Hollywood.
Maysa Leak. Jazz singer known for both her solo catalog and her collaborative work with Incognito. Maysa’s recordings keep SGRho present in adult contemporary jazz and on the international touring circuit.
Camille Winbush. NAACP Image Award winning actress whose long run on The Bernie Mac Show carried her into a generation of viewers who grew up on Black sitcoms. She remains one of the younger faces on the Famous SGRhos list, sitting alongside names like Vivica A. Fox and Sheryl Underwood on the famous Zetas roster.
SGRhos Who Shaped Education
Selena Sloan Butler
Butler, a member of the Eta Sigma chapter, was a co-founder of the National PTA. Her organizing work created the framework that connects parents to schools across the United States, and it remains one of the most quietly powerful structures in American education. She is one of the names that proves an SGRho can shape a national institution without becoming a household name.
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Cottom is an American writer, sociologist, and professor whose books Thick and Lower Ed reshaped public conversations about race, class, and higher education. Her work in academic publishing and in the long form essay has made her one of the most cited Black sociologists of her generation, and her membership keeps SGRho present at the cutting edge of public scholarship.
Lucille Baldwin Brown
Brown, a founding member of the Sorority, became the first Black public county librarian in Florida. Library access in the Jim Crow South was one of the quiet front lines of the civil rights era, and her appointment opened a public institution to thousands of Black readers who had been kept out.
Rosa Slade Gragg
Gragg founded the first Black vocational school in Detroit, creating an institution that trained Black women for skilled work at a moment when the industrial economy was actively closing doors to them. Her school sits inside SGRho’s professional-training lineage and connects the founding teachers in 1922 to vocational education in the 20th century.
Lorraine A. Williams
Williams became the first African-American woman appointed Vice President for Academic Affairs at Howard University. Her career as a historian and senior administrator helped shape Howard at one of the most important institutional moments in HBCU history.
Dr. Leenette Martin
Martin served as Interim President of Edward Waters College in 1996, leading one of the oldest HBCUs in Florida at a moment when the institution was navigating accreditation and enrollment pressures. Her tenure adds an HBCU presidency to the Sorority’s education roster.
Scholars, Builders, and Boundary-Breakers
Alice Allison Dunnigan. First African-American female journalist credentialed for White House coverage in 1948, opening the press room to generations of Black women political reporters.
Robin Kelly. U.S. House Representative for Illinois District 2 since 2013, who joined Sigma Gamma Rho while at Bradley University and is the answer to whether Robin Kelly is an SGRho.
Carmelita Jeter. Olympic sprinter with three medals from the 2012 Games, including gold in the 4×100 relay. Her speed put SGRho on the Olympic medal stand alongside Renee Powell’s PGA Hall of Fame golf career.
Maritza Correia. First African-American woman on a U.S. Olympic swim team with a medal, winning silver in 2004 and pushing Swim 1922’s mission well past the recreational pool.
Dr. Myeisha Taylor. Medical professional whose career inspired the Doc McStuffins character, a quiet way the Sorority entered millions of children’s lives without most of them knowing the line.
Lisa Price. Founder of Carol’s Daughter, the beauty brand that became one of the first natural hair lines to sit on national drugstore shelves. Her work helped reshape the mass beauty aisle.
Audrey Jones. Senior producer for ABC’s The View, who carries SGRho letters into one of the most influential daytime newsrooms in American television. The fraternity counterpart of this section sits on the famous Sigmas roster, where brothers like George Washington Carver and Huey P. Newton hold equivalent ground.
For more on the Sorority’s full institutional record, the official site at sgrho1922.org keeps a current Notable Sigmas page, and broader Divine Nine context lives at NPHC headquarters.
Carrying the Royal Blue and Gold Forward
The names above span a century of SGRho history. They are an Academy Award winner, a pioneer rapper, a Motown lead singer, a Pulitzer-track sociologist, a National PTA co-founder, a White House correspondent, an Olympic sprinter, an HBCU interim president, and a Congresswoman. They share three tenets handed down from the seven founding educators in 1922 and a mission to enhance the quality of life for women and their families in the United States and globally. The list of famous SGRhos keeps growing, and the through line stays the same. Sisterhood, scholarship, and service, carried into every room a Sigma Woman enters.