Civil Rights Official to Seek GOP Nomination

WASHINGTON — U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Arthur Fletcher Friday announced he will seek the Republican nomination for President, in part to protest what he called GOP assaults on minorities and the working class.

Fletcher, who is black, has been pushing affirmative action programs since the Richard Nixon Administration when he was a Labor Department official. Since then, three Republican presidents--Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush--have appointed him to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which he chaired from 1990 to 1993.

Fletcher, 70, said he decided to enter the 1996 race because the current GOP presidential field is pandering 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.”

At a news conference Friday in the economically depressed Anacostia area of Washington, Fletcher said he would finance his campaign largely by appealing to minorities and women to send $5 to his headquarters in Kansas City, Kan.