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Up for sale the "Father of Affirmative Action" Arthur Fletcher Signed Album Page.
ES-7112E
Arthur
Allen Fletcher (December
22, 1924 – July 12, 2005) was an American government official, widely referred
to as the "father of affirmative
action" as he was largely responsible for the Revised Philadelphia Plan.
Arthur Fletcher, a Republican,
graduated from Washburn University and
obtained a degree from distance learning school La Salle moved with his wife, Bernyce, and two youngest children to
Pasco, Washington, where he took a job with the Hanford Atomic Energy Project.
He also organized a community self-help program in predominantly black East
Pasco and landed a seat on the Pasco City Council. In 1968, Fletcher ran for
Lieutenant Governor of Washington State and narrowly lost to the incumbent,
John Cherberg. Fletcher was the first African American in Washington as well as
the West to contest a statewide electoral office. During the campaign, his
driver and bodyguard was Ted Bundy, the serial killer who was
active in Republican Party politics in the late 1960s through the early 1970s.
Fletcher's close race for Lieutenant Governor got the attention of newly
elected President Richard Nixon, who gave Fletcher a job in the incoming
administration as Assistant Secretary of Labor. An African American, he served
in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush administrations. In 1978,
Fletcher ran for mayor of Washington, D.C.,
but was defeated by the popular Democrat Marion Barry. In 1995, he briefly pursued a offer for the
Republican presidential nomination. Numbers
of his fellow Republicans were often at odds with the affirmative
action policies which Fletcher initiated and supported as
the chairman from 1990 to 1993 of the United
States Commission on Civil Rights. As head of the United Negro College Fund,
Fletcher was rumored to have coined the famous slogan, "A mind is a
terrible thing to waste." In point of fact, however, the motto was created by Forest Long, of the advertising
agency Young & Rubicam, in partnership with the Ad Council. Fletcher was a United States Army
veteran during World War II and upon his death in 2005 was buried in Arlington National
Cemetery.
