David Hamilton Golland

I'm sitting in my room at the Arctic Club Hotel in downtown Seattle, enjoying my last morning of Pacific Time. Yesterday's presentation at the Northwest African-American Museum was a success. I delivered my latest paper on Art Fletcher, the father of affirmative action, and faced interesting questions. King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, referring to Art's 1967 election to the Pasco City Council, asked about the minority and general population of Pasco at the time. A Washington State University Ph.D. candidate named Marc Robinson asked for more information about the Pasco drug trade. In both cases I did not have the answers, so I'm glad the questions were asked. I also had the good fortune to meet Patsy Fletcher, Art's daughter-in-law (Paul Fletcher's ex-wife), who chaired a panel later in the day; and Nat Jackson, Art's protege and successor at the East Pasco Self-Help Coop, who drove up from his home in Olympia. Nat and I spent most of the afternoon together; he had brought a VCR to play me a tape he had made in 1995 in which Art announced his presidential run. Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland--who has the distinction of being Tacoma's first African American woman mayor and first Asian-American woman Mayor (her father was black and her mother is Korean-American) delivered an excellent keynote address, discussing (and lamenting) the continued importance of race in American politics since the election of Barack Obama. My favorite presentations included that of University of Montana Professor Tobin Miller Shearer, who compared the aggressive use of prayer at civil rights protests in the South with displays of guns by black militants later in the period; and that of Western Carolina University Professor Pamela M. Harris, who analyzed the dearth of newspaper accounts of Irene Morgan's Supreme Court decision in an attempt to determine why Morgan, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in the 1940s, is barely remembered in comparison with Rosa Parks.