Sixth Class of Fletcher Fellows Announced

NEW YORK, Aug. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., Chairman and CEO of Fletcher Asset Management, Inc., 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 of Education.

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 White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000) and To Tell the 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 new Fletcher 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 University Professor 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's Brown 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.

Information on the program is available at the Fletcher Foundation website (www.fletcherphilanthropy.org).

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.

ALPHONSE FLETCHER, SR., FELLOWS

2005-2010

2005

• Elizabeth Alexander, Professor of African American Studies and Chair of the African American Studies Department, Yale University, “‘Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen’: Post-Civil Rights African-American Poetry and Poetics”
• Devon Carbado, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law, “Working Identity”
• Kathleen Cleaver, Senior Lecturer in African American Studies, Yale University, Senior Research Scholar, Yale Law School, and Senior Lecturer, School of Law, Emory University, “Memories of Love and War”(memoir)
• Stanley Crouch, critic and writer, new essays and fiction on American racial culture
• Roland Fryer, Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics, Harvard University, research related to affirmative action, discrimination, and social economics
• Anita Hill, Professor of Law, Social Policy, and Women’s Studies, Brandeis University, “Ending Educational Disparities: A Comprehensive Index for Evaluating Educational Success”
• Nina Jablonski, Professor and Head of Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, “Improving the Public Understanding of the Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color”
• Glenn Ligon, painter/visual artist, “The Shadow,” a major painting cycle and video project based on the Hans Christian Andersen story
• Arthur Mitchell, Co-Founder and Artistic Director, Dance Theatre of Harlem, two projects: autobiographical document, and the formation of an accredited conservatory in partnership with the Manhattan School of Music, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and School of Visual Arts
• Robert P. Moses, Founder, The Algebra Project, Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Quality Public School Education as a Civil Right (QECR)”
• Thomas Sugrue, David Boies Professor of History and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, “Sweet Land of Liberty: The Unfinished Struggle for Racial Equality in the North, 1935-present”
• Deborah Willis, Professor and Chair of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, and University Professor, New York University, “Reflections in Black: Black Photographers 1840 to the Present: A Documentary”

2006

• Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Social Sciences, Harvard University, “Unfair by Design: Black and White Americans View the New Law and Order Regime”
• Fatimah L.C. Jackson, Professor of Biological Anthropology, Director, Institute of African American Research, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, “Development and use of new computation-assisted alternatives to the racial model in social, cultural, and biological research”
• Randall L. Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, “Where Do We Go from Here?: Explorations of Race, Law, and Politics in Twenty-first Century America”
• Miranda K.S. Massie, Scheff & Washington, P.C., Detroit “Equality under Fire: The Ongoing Struggle for Racial Justice”
• Lorna Simpson, visual artist
• Anna Deveare Smith, University Professor, Department of Performance Studies, New York University, “Let Me Down Easy”
• Valerie Smith, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Department of English, Princeton University, “In Retrospect: The Civil Rights Movement in Contemporary Culture”
• Margaret Beale Spencer, Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, “Patterns of Resiliency and Resistance: Crafting Identities in a Post-Brown Era of Privilege and Risk”
• Brent Staples, The New York Times, “The Secret History of Race: The Story of ‘Black’ Americans Who Lived Their Lives as ‘White’”
• Patricia Sullivan, Associate Professor of History, “Struggle Toward Freedom: A History of the NAACP”
• Loic Wacquant, Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Institute for Legal Research, Boalt Law School, University of California, Berkeley, “‘Peculiar Institutions’: A Historical Sociology of Racial Rule in the United States”

2007

• Hilton Als, The New Yorker, "The Group"
• Cheryl Finley, Assistant Professor of History of Art, Cornell University, "Picturing Black Power! U.S. Civil Rights and African Liberation Movements on Film"
• Joy James, Professor of the Humanities and Political Science, Williams College, "Winnowing Democracy—Black Women in National Politics: 1964-2004, Fannie Lou Hamer to Condoleezza Rice"
• Kenneth W. Mack, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, "Representing the Race: The Transformation of Civil Rights Lawyering and Politics, 1920-1955"
• Charles M. Payne, Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago, "Fragile Victories: Improving Urban Schools at Scale"

2008

• Clayborne Carson, Professor of History and Founding Director of The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, "The Liberation Curriculum"
• Kellie Jones, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University , "Eyeminded: A Life of Art and Writing"
• Kimberle Crenshaw, Professor of Law, UCLA and Columbia Law Schools, “Shattering the Colorblind Ruse: Recapturing the Legacy of Brown.”
• Stacy L. Leeds, Professor of Law at the University of Kansas School of Law, “Ties That Bind: Freedmen Citizenship and the Cherokee Nation.”

2009

• Emily Bernard, Associate Professor of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, “Race in an Intimate Space: Stories from the Classroom”
• Rachel Devlin, Associate Professor of History, Tulane University, “Girls on the Front Line: Gender and the Battle to Desegregate Public Schools, 1945-1965”
• Llewellyn Smith, Founder and President, Vital Pictures, Inc., “Dilemma and Creed: America Seen From the Outside”
• Keivan Stassun, Associate Professor of Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, Adjunct Professor of Physics, Fisk University, “Integrating the Science Professions: Using Theory to Leverage the Impact of a Successful Institutional Partnership for Full Participation in the Sciences”

2010

• Mia Bay, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University, "Traveling Black: A Social History of Segregated Transportation"
• Richard Thompson Ford, George E. Osborne Professor of Law, Stanford Law School "Rights Gone Wrong: Rescuing Social Justice from the Law"
• Tyrone Forman, Associate Professor of Sociology, Emory University, "After 55: Desegregation, Interracial Contact and Race Relations among American Youth"

SOURCE Fletcher Foundation