Its membership includes two premiers; four governors; a vice president, four senators; a Supreme Court justice; two presidential candidates; Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Lenin Peace Prize, Kluge Prize, Golden Globe, Academy Award, Grammy Award, and Emmy Award winners; French Légion d'honneur and Croix de Guerre laureates; at least four Rhodes Scholars; eighteen diplomats; fourteen Presidential Medal of Freedom, seven Congressional Gold Medal, and seventeen Spingarn Medal recipients; and eighteen Olympians.
Buildings, monuments, stadiums, arenas, courthouses, and schools have been named after Alpha men, such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the Thurgood Marshall Public Policy Building at the University of Maryland, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the Whitney Young Memorial Bridge, the Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium, the Paul Robeson Plaza at Rutgers University, the Jack Trice Stadium at Iowa State University, the John H. Johnson School of Communication at Howard University, the Oscar W. Ritchie Pan-African Cultural Arts Center at Kent State University, the Arvarh E. Strickland General Classroom Building at the University of Missouri-Columbia, the G. Larry James Memorial Stadium, the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse, the John H. Stroger Cook County hospital, the John Hope Franklin Memorial Plaza in Tulsa Oklahoma, the Stephan P. Mickle Sr.
When speaking about the poem in 1981, Brown cited his experiences with Beta (Washington, D.C.), Theta (Chicago), Xi Lambda (Chicago Alumni), and Eta Lambda (Atlanta Alumni) as collective inspirations for the poem.
The statement has become a manifesto for the national fraternity and chapters, as each may symbolically be referred to as a "House of Alpha".
The scholarships have been awarded to applicants annually since 1902 by the Rhodes Trust in Oxford based on academic qualities, as well as those of character.