Tuscaloosa, Alabama

On the first day of sorority rush last September, Melody Twilley woke up and could not find her lavender nail polish. This constituted a bit of an emergency. The night before, Twilley, an 18-year-old student at the University of Alabama, had borrowed a blue and purple slip dress with spaghetti straps from one of her roommates; the lavender nail polish, in her opinion, was essential to completing the outfit. She tore her room apart, emptying drawers and scattering papers, and after half an hour found the polish. But then, when Twilley went to fetch the dress out of the closet, it wasn't there. Another frantic search ensued until Twilley discovered the dress, laid out on a chair, where she had placed it the night before for easy detection. It was that kind of morning.

By noon, however, Twilley was put together and standing in front of the Delta Zeta house, a neoclassical mansion on sorority row. And at twelve o'clock sharp, the doors opened and the young women gathered in the foyer burst into song: "Delta Zeta is the best! Pledge Delta Zeta!" Twilley was ushered in and handed a glass of ice water. For 15 minutes she made small talk with the women who would determine whether she was Delta Zeta material. Then it was on to Zeta Tau Alpha for another round of singing and small talk. Then Alpha Delta Pi, and then Chi Omega. By eight that evening, Twilley had visited 15 sorority houses and had the same conversation 15 times. "They ask where you're from, you ask where they're from. They ask what you're majoring in, you ask what they're majoring in," Twilley recalled. "That's about all you can really do in 15 minutes." Save for some small touches— Zeta Tau Alpha put strawberries in their ice water; Phi Mu gave the rushees a house tour—there was little to differentiate one sorority from the next. "All of them seemed pretty much the same," Twilley said.

There was also little to differentiate Twilley from the 730 other University of Alabama women going through rush last fall. A tall, pretty girl with a fondness for shopping malls and the Jeep Grand Cherokee her father bought for her, Twilley blended right in to the roiling mix of social ambition and social privilege. But Twilley did differ in two ways. For one thing, unlike the vast majority of rushees, who are admitted into sororities as freshmen, this wasn't Twilley's first time through. She had tried—and failed—to join a sorority the year before. Which may have had something to do with the other thing that set Melody Twilley apart: She is black.

The University of Alabama was founded in 1831, but it did not enroll its first black student until 125 years later; she lasted three days before being expelled "for her own safety." In 1963 the university integrated for good, with then-Governor George Wallace making his famous "stand in the schoolhouse door" in defiance of federal marshals escorting two black students to register for classes. Since then, the university has made some impressive strides—today blacks constitute 14.5 percent of the undergraduate student body, making the university one of the most integrated state schools in the South—but social integration has been more elusive. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the university's Greek system, which is almost completely divided by race. A few of the school's eight historically black fraternities and sororities have had a handful of white members over the years, but the 37 traditionally white fraternities and sororities have not been as welcoming. Indeed, when Melody Twilley stood in front of the Delta Zeta house last September, it was believed that no white fraternity or sorority at the University of Alabama had ever offered membership to a black student. More remarkably, aside from a handful of faculty and administrators, no one at the school seemed to care—least of all its black students. And the segregated Greek system is not just a campus issue. That's because in insular Alabama, where the friendships and connections that matter most in life are often made during the four years you spend in Tuscaloosa, if you can't enter the university's white Greek system, you're unlikely to enter the state's political and economic elite.