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Apology to 5 Stars Considered by NAACP Leader

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Times Staff Writer

The executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People will decide whether to apologize to five black recording stars who were accused by a Los Angeles NAACP official of discriminating against other black professionals in the industry, a top NAACP official said Tuesday.

Fred Rasheed, national director of the NAACP’s economic development program, said in a telephone interview from New York that Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, will be sending letters soon to the five artists and to six major recording companies explaining the NAACP’s concern about discrimination in the recording industry.

“The nature of those communications will be decided in meetings with Dr. Hooks this week,” he said. “Obviously internal politics have been involved here which must be dealt with.

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“The decision as to whether there will be a formal apology from the NAACP will be made at the national level by Dr. Hooks,” Rasheed added.

The crux of the internal NAACP dispute is whether it is appropriate for the national civil rights organization to publicly identify and pressure blacks--particularly black superstars--to hire more blacks in their own operations.

The dispute started last week when a regional NAACP coordinator, Melanie Lomax, said in an interview with The Times that the NAACP was launching a national fair share campaign to obtain more jobs for blacks behind the scenes in jobs ranging from video production to hairdressing.

She accused five artists--Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross and Prince--of practicing “hypocritical discrimination” against black promoters, photographers and other professionals. The accusations were based upon research conducted by Black Business for Equity in Entertainment, a Los Angeles-based group of black promoters, photographers, video makers and others who work in the recording industry, she said.

Spokesmen for Turner, Jackson, Richie, Prince and Ross denied any such discrimination.

On Monday, the presidents of both the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP branches issued a press release saying Lomax’s accusations had not been authorized by the national NAACP office and were out of order because the artists had not been personally informed in advance.

“We, therefore, apologize to those entertainers named,” the release said.

Willis Edwards, president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch that deals most closely with the recording industry, said in an interview Tuesday that Mailgrams were being sent out immediately to the five artists apologizing for the snafu.

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Internal Disputes

However, Rasheed said no such Mailgrams had been authorized. By late in the day, both Lomax and Edwards stressed in interviews that they hoped to patch up internal disputes in the name of carrying out the fair share campaign.

“The only thing I regret, frankly, is the appearance of disharmony among members of the NAACP and the fact that this has shifted interest away from the main issue, which is discrimination in the recording industry,” Lomax said.

“We will all be working together with the national office,” Edwards said. “There’s no doubt about it that there is total, blatant racial discrimination in the industry.”

Asked if he believed that the black stars had practiced discrimination, he said: “I don’t even want to make any comment on that at all, just at all.”

The NAACP has signed fair share agreements with 36 companies in different industries in the past four years. The agreements are designed to return to the black community in the form of jobs, contracts and contributions a fair share of the profits the companies make on black consumers.

A spokesman for the New York-based Recording Industry Assn. of America, a trade group that represents record companies, estimated in an interview that black artists may have brought in up to a third of all profits in the recording industry last year. However, according to the NAACP, a declining percentage of contracts and jobs have gone to black companies and black professionals behind the scenes.

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