David Hamilton Golland

Academic Historian

David Hamilton Golland is an associate professor of history at Governors State University in Chicago, Illinois. The author of Constructing Affirmative Action: the Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), he holds a Ph.D. and B.A in from the City University of New York and an M.A. from the University of Virginia. He is currently working on a biography of Arthur Fletcher.

The Philadelphia Plan (1967-1970)

The Philadelphia Plan was a federal affirmative action program established in 1967 to racially integrate the building construction trade unions through mandatory goals for nonwhite hiring on federal construction contracts. Declared illegal in 1968, a revised version was successfully defended by the Nixon Administration and … Read MoreThe Philadelphia Plan (1967-1970)

Arthur Allen Fletcher, “The Father of Affirmative Action”

Arthur Fletcher and President George H.W. Bush in the White House, 1990 Image Ownership: Public Domain Arthur Allen Fletcher is known to many as the father of affirmative action.  In the following account historian David Hamilton Golland describes the career of Fletcher, a Republican civil rights … Read MoreArthur Allen Fletcher, “The Father of Affirmative Action”