Rights Panel Member Joins GOP Race for White House

Arthur Fletcher, a Republican member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, joined the 1996 presidential race Friday, urging his party not to abandon minorities and the working class.

Fletcher, a strong advocate of affirmative action, said: “My party has designed a top-down strategy, which says the wealthy, the rich, the affluent belong to this party. Anybody that doesn’t earn $35,000 a year is out of the equation.

“It’s time to stop that and say there’s room for anybody who wants to participate in the Republican Party.”

He announced his candidacy at a news conference in the economically depressed Anacostia area of Washington.

Fletcher has been promoting affirmative action programs since he was an official in the Labor Department during the Richard Nixon Administration.

Since then, three Republican presidents--Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush--have appointed him to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which he chaired from 1990 to 1993. He is 70 years old.

Fletcher contended that Republican presidential candidates already in the race must pander to the right wing in ways that threaten gains made in civil rights since the 1960s.

“There’s not a ghost of a chance of their being nominated . . . unless they engage in the race-baiting, gender-bashing tactics of the moment,” Fletcher said.

“My concern, more than anything else, is to see to it that the party doesn’t completely end up abandoning the middle, where the majority of the voters live, in pursuit of the nomination,” he added.

Fletcher first entered Republican politics in Kansas and was vice chairman of the state GOP from 1955-57.

In 1969, while working in the Labor Department, he helped implement the “revised Philadelphia plan” that set and enforced equal opportunity employment standards for companies with federal contracts.

He said Friday that he would finance his campaign largely by appealing to minorities and women, asking them to send $5 contributions to his headquarters in Kansas City, Kan.

His slogan: “Send five and keep affirmative action alive.”

With that money, Fletcher said he intends to lease a bus to re-create the “Freedom Rides” of the 1960s to get his message out.

“I will not be a high-flying, expensive candidate. I’m going to make sure the small people know I am their candidate,” Fletcher said.