Arthur Allen Fletcher is known to many as the father of affirmative action.  In the following account historian David Hamilton Golland describes the career of Fletcher, a Republican civil rights activist during the last half of the 20th Century.

Arthur Allen Fletcher, known to many as the father of affirmative action, was born on December 22, 1924, in Phoenix, Arizona. Little is known of Fletcher’s birth father, but his mother, Edna, soon married Buffalo Soldier Andrew Fletcher, who would eventually adopt Arthur. The family moved from one Army base to another for much of Arthur’s childhood before finally settling in Junction City, Kansas.

Fletcher graduated from Junction City High School in 1943, after leading a protest against the school yearbook which placed the photos of black students in a separate section in the back of the publication.  Fletcher in his senior year organized a boycott of the segregated yearbook and the following year the practice was permanently dropped.  

While at Junction City High Fletcher met Mary Harden, a daughter of one of the local black communitys wealthiest families.  Hardens grandparents had owned much of the land that eventually became Fort Riley.  They married in May 1943 just as he graduated.  Within a year their daughter Phyllis was born, followed by Sylvia (1945), Arthur, Jr. (1947), Paul (1948), and Philip (1949).

Fletcher joined the U.S. Army immediately upon graduation from high school and in the Spring of 1944 was sent to England, where he performed in one of many Army bands and played intramural football. In the fall of 1944 he was a military police officer on the “Red Ball Express” supply line in France.  The following spring Fletcher was wounded while serving in Germany in General George Patton’s Third Army.  He recovered and was discharged later that year.

Returning to Kansas after the war, Fletcher enrolled in Washburn University in Topeka on the G.I. Bill.  While at Washburn he was a doorman at the state legislature and a waiter at the Jayhawk Hotel, a