The annual fellowship program established by financial executive Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, has named four scholars as 2008 Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellows, Fletcher announced Tuesday. Among those awards is Stacy L. Leeds, professor of law at the University of Kansas School of Law, Cherokee citizen and resident of Cherokee County.

Each fellow will receive a stipend for scholarly work that seeks to improve racial equality in American society and pursues the broad social goals set forth by Brown v. Board of Education.

The other Fletcher Fellows are as follows: Dr. Clayborne Carson, professor of history at Stanford University and founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute; Dr. Kellie Jones, an associate professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University; and, Kimberle Crenshaw, a professor of law at the University of California-Los Angeles and Columbia Law Schools.

Leeds was chosen from a pool of more than 80 applicants. Fletcher added that one of the top considerations within the selection process is an applicant’s ability to bring a proposed project to finish within one year.

Leeds will produce a comprehensive history of the Cherokee freedmen, the African-American slaves held by the Cherokee Nation until the 1860s, and their descendants entitled, “Ties That Bind: Freedmen Citizenship and the Cherokee Nation.”

Leeds has been active in her Cherokee community and supportive of the arts and humanities. She lives near Tahlequah with her husband Michael Stewart and son, Hunter Andrew.