NEW YORK -- Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., Chairman and CEO of Fletcher AssetManagement, Inc., has announced the selection of the 2010-2011 class of Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellows. A charitable initiative created in 2004, the Fletcher Fellowship program commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the United States Supreme Court's landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Each of this year's three Fletcher Fellows will receive a stipend of $50,000 for work that contributes to improving racial equality in American society and furthers the broad social goals of Brown v. Board ofEducation.
Regarding the sixth class of Fellows, Mr. Fletcher said, "Following the legacy of Brown, the three new fellows address questions of social justice and equal opportunity from the fields of history, sociology, and the law. Their projects embrace both the broad promise of Brown and the complications that have arisen in its implementation. Their scholarship is as relevant today as it would have been decades ago because, while often disguised today, unequal treatment persists to the long-term detriment of all in society." A description of the 2010-2011 Fletcher Fellows and their projects follows: Mia Bay is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she is Associate Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity. In 2009-2010, she was in residence as the John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her fellowship project, "Traveling Black: A Social History of Segregated Transportation," examines segregated transportation and black mobility as an enduring site for African American struggles for freedom and equality. She is the author of The WhiteImage in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000) and To Tellthe Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Macmillan, 2009). Richard Thompson Ford is George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He is an expert on civil rights and antidiscrimination law who writes for both the popular press and the legal academy. His fellowship project is "Rights Gone Wrong: Rescuing Social Justice from the Law," a bold examination of the ways in which legal desegregation has not necessarily eliminated subtler and more elusive racial injustices in areas including public education and employment opportunities.. He is the author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). Tyrone Forman is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University, where he serves as Co- Director of Emory's Race and Difference Initiative. His fellowship project, "After 55: Desegregation, Interracial Contact and Race Relations among American Youth," explores the long-term consequences on racial attitudes and racial composition of friendship networks in young and middle adulthood of having attended a racially and ethnically diverse high school. He is one of the leading sociologists of intergroup relations among people of color, of the social determinants of racial attitudes, of the social consequences of racial stratification among African Americans, and on adolescent health and well-being. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chair of the fellowship program's selection committee and the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, commented: "The newFletcher Fellows carry on the conversation about race, social justice, and equal opportunity that has been started, and energized, by the 36 fellows preceding them." Gates added, "The Fletcher Fellowship Program continues to foster interdisciplinary scholarship and creative work on race relations post-Brown in a way that no other program matches." The Selection Committee is chaired by Gates and includes Professor K. Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller UniversityProfessor of Philosophy, Princeton University; Professor Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University; Dr. James P. Comer, Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center, Director of the School Development Program, and Associate Dean for Student Affairs, Yale School of Medicine; Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Dr. Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania. This year's Committee selected the three Fletcher Fellows from a pool of more than 80 applicants. Each Fellow will deliver a project talk in the fall. Details of that talk will be provided on a later date. About the Fletcher Fellowships Named for Mr. Alphonse Fletcher, Sr., The Fletcher Fellowships are awarded to scholars, writers, and artists whose work contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court'sBrown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Dr. Bettye Fletcher is the director of the Fletcher Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Fletcher Asset Management, which administers the fellowship program. The Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellows Program was created in 2004 on the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v.Board of Education decision. In 2004, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the decision, Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., the Chairman and CEO of Fletcher Asset Management, Inc., announced a $50 million philanthropic initiative, of which the Fellowship Program is the centerpiece. The announcement of the sixth class of Fellows brings to 39 the number of Fletcher Fellows working in diverse fields including literature, history and the social sciences, the visual and performing arts, journalism, science, and the law. Previous recipients include Stanley Crouch, Anna Deveare Smith, Anita Hill, Brent Staples,Elizabeth Alexander, Kathleen Cleaver, Glenn Ligon, and Hilton Als. ALPHONSE FLETCHER, SR., FELLOWS 2005-2010 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
The Fletcher Foundation is a not-for-profit private charitable organization created by Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. in 1993, approximately two years after his founding of Fletcher Asset Management, Inc. (FAM). Just as one of FAM's primary goals is to generate strong investment returns by investing in "responsible" companies, The Fletcher Foundation seeks to invest in, and thereby provide strong returns for, communities. The Foundation, in conjunction with charitable contributions from FAM and Mr. Fletcher, supports a wide variety of programs and charitable activities and is most strongly committed to projects that better the community at large. Projects include current use donations through the Fletcher Fund at the New York Community Trust and endowment scale gifts to select institutions in commemoration of the 1954 landmark Supreme Court Decision Brown v. Board of Education.