2 NAACP Units Balk at Campaign Against Singers

Two Southern California chapters of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People publicly dissociated themselves Monday from a nationwide NAACP campaign announced last week against six record companies and five black stars accused of discriminating against blacks in their hiring practices.

The Los Angeles and Beverly Hills-Hollywood branches of the NAACP issued a joint press release Monday apologizing to the black recording artists who had been singled out in the campaign.

The campaign was disclosed in interviews with the Los Angeles Times by Melanie Lomax, Southern California regional coordinator of what the NAACP calls its “fair share” program to promote equitable hiring and economic practices by employers, and Fred Rasheed, national director of NAACP’s economic development program.

Rasheed said the aim of the program was to negotiate voluntary “fair share” agreements with six major record companies--Capitol Industries-EMI Inc., CBS Records, RCA Records, MCA Records Inc., Warner Bros. Records Inc. and Polygram Records Inc.

Lomax specificly accused five stars--Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross and Prince--of practicing “hypocritical discrimination” against black professionals such as video-makers, advertising agents and promoters who work behind the scenes. The campaign was brought to the attention of the regional conference by a group of established black industry professionals called Black Business for Equity in Entertainment, she said.

The press release issued Monday by the two chapters of the regional NAACP conference, however, declared that the companies and entertainers had been named “prematurely.”

Concern With Industry

“A preliminary investigation reveals that the major concern is with the record industry and not the entertainers,” the release said. “Since the investigation is not complete, the NAACP is not in a position at this time to target or identify any record company or entertainer. . . . We, therefore, apologize to those entertainers named.”

Lomax responded that the investigation was never being carried out by individual chapters of the NAACP in the first place, and therefore it was not their place to make statements about its progress.

“This is a project of the Southern California Conference and the National NAACP,” she said. “The branches are not conducting the investigation and I am very disappointed in their statement. I believe that it stems largely from a disagreement over the strategy of naming black artists. But their disagreement is irrelevant to the national project.”