Alphonse Fletcher donates $50 million to further goals of Brown case

Jet, June 7, 2004

On the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, leading Black Wall Street money manager/philanthropist Alphonse "Buddy" Fletcher, Jr., chairman of Fletcher Asset Management, announced a campaign in which he, his company and his foundations will donate $50 million in support of efforts to close the class divide between the Blacks who have benefited from the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and those who have not.

According to Emmett Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation and specialist on Black charitable giving, the $50 million donation stands as one of the single largest of its kind ever made by an African-American.

A committee of advisors has been created to work with Fletcher on the best ways to disburse the funds. The committee includes Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of the African and African-American Studies department at Harvard; Thelma Golden, curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; James P. Comer, professor of child psychiatry at Yale; K. Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at Princeton; and Amy Gutmann, provost of Princeton and the president-elect of the University of Pennsylvania. Gates will serve as committee chairman.

The first commitment of the initiative will be "Fifty Fellowships of Fifty Thousand Dollars." The 50 fellowships, modeled after the Guggenheim Fellowships, will each provide $50,000 in support of a scholar or artist whose work furthers the goal of the Brown decision. The exact timing of the money's disbursement and the duration will be decided sometime in June.

Fletcher said that a portion of the money will support established institutions such as Howard University School of Law, the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

"I am thankful for opportunities that the Brown decision created for my family and many other Americans," said Fletcher, 38. "However, education and other opportunities are still not 'available to all on equal terms.' The class divide especially within the African-American community must be addressed if we aspire to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's challenge. In the Justice's Michigan case majority opinion she expressed hope that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary."

"We hope to identify and support those individuals and institutions that can leverage our support to try to make the Court's expectation a reality."

Fletcher is a Harvard graduate with a degree in applied mathematics. The former Wall Street trader grew up in Waterford, CT, and currently resides in Manhattan.