"Father of Affirmative Action" Arthur Fletcher Signed Album Page for sale

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.

"Father of Affirmative Action" Arthur Fletcher Signed Album Page:
$299.99