Bill Fletcher

​For decades, Bill Fletcher has written nonfiction books, journal articles, political essays and training lessons for labor and social justice organizations. He has earned an international reputation as a leader in the fight for racial, gender and economic justice. Numerous unions and other social justice organizations have invited him to speak at conferences, symposiums and workshops.

After producing insightful works for years, Bill decided he wanted to try writing something different. Inspired by Walter Mosley, Danny Glover, and the Film Noir genre of, he ventured into the dark and dangerous terrain of the hard boiled crime novel.

He switched horses.

Bill’s journey as a writer began in childhood. His great-grandfather, William Stanley Braithwaite, was an enormous influence. A widely known poet and scholar, Braithwaite was a friend of W.E.B. Dubois and was a mentor to many of the artists and writers in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.

​Bill recalls his great-grandfather reciting poetry and extolling the virtues of story-telling. Yet there were so many things about the gentleman's life that he never discovered until well after Mr. Braithwaite passed away. His great-grandfather was especially encouraging of Bill's curiosity about the world.

Bill and his family spent many summers on Cape Cod, which is where he met Cape Verdean Americans. Cape Verde is an archipelago off the west coast of Africa. It was settled by the Portuguese military, who used it as a transit point for the slave trade. On the islands, European and African people intermingled, which resulted in a population of many different shades of color. On some islands the people were mostly darkly complected; on others, light and able to pass for white.

In the 1800’s, Cape Verdean sailors and fishermen came to America. They were the first post-1492 free, non-slave Africans to settle in North America. They found work in New England as whalers, fishermen, sailors, and eventually other sectors of the economy. Many settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and on Cape Cod.

As a lad, Bill made friends with a young Cape Verdean fellow, and their friendship lasted for years. The young man’s family, and other Cape Verdeans on Cape Cod, gave Bill a window into the lives and struggles of this population of immigrants and their descendants.

Bill’s parents encouraged the young man to go to college and become an intellectual. Their initial hope was that he would become a lawyer, as was considering that path at the time. With his excellent grades and extracurricular activities, Bill was accepted by several top tier universities. He chose Harvard.

Studying at Harvard was an eye-opening experience for Bill. Finding kinship and knowledge in the growing civil rights and Black Power movements, Bill became involved with radical student activism, a continuation of his activism in high school. This became a study-in-contrast, given the purpose of Harvard, as with other elite schools, is to train new members of the ruling class around the capitalist world.

Bill graduated with honors. But with his commitment to racial and economic justice, he joined many other radicals in the 1970s and went to work in industry, eventually landing a training and tradesman position as a welder in the Quincy shipyard outside of Boston.

His father was most displeased. Expecting his son to go on from Harvard to law school, Fletcher Sr. let his son know how deeply disappointed he was.

Bill stuck to his radical politics. While at the shipyard he became engaged in a rank & file effort to reform the local union. While there, his name was added to the ‘list’ of shipyard workers who suffered serious—and sometimes deadly—accidents, having fallen twenty feet. For health and other reasons, Bill left the shipyard and was recruited to serve as an organizer for District 65-United Auto Workers in Boston. This began many years as a full-time union staff person.

He worked for many major unions, from the UAW to the National Postal Mail Handlers Union to SEIU, the AFL-CIO and American Federation of Government Employees. He served a term as President of TransAfrica, Forum, the organization that had led the US-wing of the anti-apartheid movement. Bill was the organization’s second president, after the retirement of the late Randall Robinson, and helped to rebuild the organization and expand its engagement into South America. His writing included authoring or-coauthoring ”They’re Bankrupting Us!” And Other Myths About Unions; Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a new path to social justice.

While satisfied with his nonfiction writing—and with no intent to abandon it—Bill felt he could reach readers on a deeper level if he took a chance and tried writing a novel.

Consider Charles Dickens. At the height of his popularity in the nineteenth century he began writing a political pamphlet about Christmas, greed, and the cruel oppression of industrial capitalism. Halfway through the writing, he looked at his work and realized the essay would not change any one’s mind. It would not deeply touch anyone’s heart. So he tore it up and began to write a fairy tale, A Christmas Carole, and the rest is history.
No word, sentence, paragraph or chapter can pierce the heart so deeply as a well-crafted character who faces adversity and somehow find a way (often with the help of new friends and comrades) to reach that far off goal: happiness. Security. Love.
Dickens isn’t the only one to write social criticism in the guise of a novel. W.E.B. Dubois wrote a short science fiction story, The Comet, which follows a black banker and a white woman in 1920 New York City who survive the devastating impact of a comet and try to imagine a new society  that is not bound and contorted by race. Walter Mosley more recently has investigated race and class in his powerful crime novels.
Like DuBois and Mosley, Bill realized he could engage readers, many of whom will not read nonfiction, if he could create a fictional world with characters that the reader cares about. In his first novel, The Man Who Fell From the Sky, the protagonist is a Cape Verdean American who must navigate the treacherous terrain of Cape Verdean and African American relations, not to mention the perilous contact with whites in the racist enclaves of Massachusetts.


As you walk in his protagonist’s shoes, feel his fear, laugh at his foibles, cheer at his victories, you think about the issues and obstacles that many of us face. His story is your story, and you come away from his book renewed in your belief that you, with others at your side, can triumph over those who would hold you back. Hold you down.
His second novel, The Man Who Changed Colors, continues Bill’s reflections and explorations of the issues that matter most to him. Slip into his world and you will expand your own.

Listen to Bill talking about race, class and the crime novel at the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul/Minneapolis, click here...

Listen to Bill on Radio KPFA Los Angeles discussing Future Trump Power Grabs and John Nichols on Policing, Journalism and Beyond, click here....