support improved race relations
Two members of the Yale faculty, Elizabeth Alexander and Kathleen Cleaver, have received inaugural Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowships for projects designed to help improve race relations in American society.
The new fellowships were established by the Fletcher Foundation last year in honor of the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. The $50,000 stipends will support work that continues the progress toward racial equality that began with the Brown decision.
"Through a variety of approaches, the Fletcher Fellows will help us understand the important changes ushered in by Brown and also the work that still needs to be done to fulfill the goal of equal access to opportunities and the resources of this rich society," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Gates chaired the selection committee, which included Yale professor Dr. James P. Comer.
"Some of the recipients use their work to address directly the legacy -- both the successes and failures -- of Brown, while other recipients address that legacy indirectly, in their own educational and career paths to fulfill the goal of equal access to the tremendous opportunities and extraordinarily rich resources of contemporary American society," added Gates.
Alexander, associate professor (adjunct) of African American studies, will use her fellowship for a project titled "'Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen': Post-Civil Rights African-American Poetry and Poetics." Cleaver, senior lecturer in African American studies and senior research scientist at the Law School, will use her Fletcher Fellowship to support work on her memoir "Memories of Love and War."
Other members of the first class of Fletcher Fellows were: legal scholars Devon Carbado and Anita Hill; writer and critic Stanley Crouch; social economist Roland Fryer; anthropologist Nina Jablonski; painter and visual artist Glenn Ligon; Dance Theatre of Harlem director Arthur Mitchell; The Algebra Project founder Robert P. Moses; historian and sociologist Thomas Sugrue; and art historian Deborah Willis.
The 12 Fletcher Fellows were chosen from among 250 applicants in a range of fields. Founded in 1993, the Fletcher Foundation is a not-for-profit private charitable organization that seeks to invest in -- and thereby provides strong returns for -- communities. Further information is available at www.fletcherphilanthropy.org.
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