The First Black Borough President of Manhattan, Hulan Jack, Was a Member of Phi Beta Sigma

Did you know that Hulan Jack, the first Black person to serve as Borough President of Manhattan, was a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.? Jack was initiated through the Alpha Delta chapter at the City College of New York.

Hulan Edwin Jack was born in 1905 on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, the son of a clergyman who later became a bishop. He immigrated to New York City in 1923 as a teenager and took a job at a paper box company, where he worked his way up from janitor to vice president while studying business administration at night. It was a classic New York rise, and it set the stage for a groundbreaking political career.

Jack got his start in Harlem’s Democratic political scene and, beginning in 1940, won a seat in the New York State Assembly, which he would hold for more than a decade. As an assemblyman, he built a reputation as a determined advocate for civil rights, introducing legislation to end discrimination in employment and housing well before such measures were popular.

His crowning achievement came in 1953, when Jack was elected Borough President of Manhattan, becoming the first African American to hold the office and the highest-ranking Black municipal official in the nation at the time. The Black press celebrated the milestone across the country, with one outlet hailing him as the “boss of Manhattan.” He served from 1954 to 1960, securing investment in highways, transit, and public works, converting vacant lots into playgrounds, and meeting with world figures from President John F. Kennedy to Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah.

Jack later returned to public service with another stint in the New York State Assembly from 1968 to 1972. Hulan Jack died in New York City in 1986, remembered as a Caribbean immigrant who broke a historic barrier in American politics and embodied the Phi Beta Sigma motto, “Culture for Service and Service for Humanity.”

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