NAACP Targets Record Companies Next in ‘Fair Share’ Job Campaign

Citing what they called a continuing pattern of discrimination in the record industry, officials of the NAACP said Wednesday they will attempt to negotiate “fair share” agreements with major record companies in an attempt to get more blacks employed in the business.

The leaders said the effort, to be discussed at next week’s national convention of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in Baltimore, will be similar to campaigns mounted against other industries.

Over the last five years, the NAACP has signed fair share agreements with more than 35 companies, including McDonald’s restaurants and Coors beer. The agreements commit the companies to return to the black community in the form of jobs, contracts and contributions a share of profits made from black consumers.

Raymond Johnson Jr., president of the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP, and L. R. Byrd, national consultant to the economic development department of the NAACP, said in an interview that the record industry campaign will focus on several key goals:

- More blacks should sit on the boards of the large record companies, with more blacks also in senior management positions.

- “Aggressive” affirmative action programs should be started by the companies.

- More jobs for independent black suppliers, vendors, lawyers and the like should be provided by the companies.

- The record companies should make contributions for “the support of black causes,” such as the United Negro College Fund.

- More individual pop music acts, both black and white, should employ black managers, who, in turn, would be more open to local black concert promoters.

Significantly, the fair share campaign will be aimed primarily at the record companies and not individual black stars. Last July, criticism by some NAACP officials of big-name black stars Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross and Prince for “excluding blacks from their operations” touched off a short-lived brouhaha.

The stars denied the charges, saying they were color-blind and simply seek out the most qualified people, regardless of race. And Benjamin L. Hooks, NAACP executive director, later termed the bias claim “unfortunate.”

Hooks appointed a six-member task force to look into the allegations on an industry-wide basis, and it is the task force’s findings that will be discussed at the convention that begins this Sunday, Johnson and Byrd said.

The two discussed those findings Wednesday only in general terms. Johnson and Byrd said the task force has discovered “a substantial division” in the industry between the black and pop music divisions of the companies.

Byrd said that even though “in some companies, the black artists are carrying the companies,” black field representatives who promote their products with radio stations that program for a predominately black audience generally make less money than their white counterparts who call on pop music stations.

Also, blacks are under-represented in the ranks of managers of individual entertainers. “Of the top 20 acts in the country, black or white, we can’t find a single black manager,” he said.

The paucity of black managers leads, in turn, to a lack of employment of blacks in support capacities--such as sound men, photographers, video cameramen, make up artists and publicists, Byrd claimed.

He said there are few successful black promoters of concerts on the local level. “Black promoters have access to only about 30% of the top acts and most black promoters don’t have access to white acts at all,” Byrd said.

“The message throughout the industry is that if you’re black you’re not capable of being a top-level manager or promoter,” he said, adding, “We (the NAACP) are not going to any longer accept that kind of segregation.”

Los Angeles representatives of the larger record companies either declined immediate comment or could not be reached for comment.

Though officials of the New York-based Recording Industry Assn. of America, which represents 85% of the nation’s record companies, could not be reached for comment, they have said in the past that the association and individual record companies will be glad to listen to and act on the NAACP’s complaints.

Byrd said the industry does seem open to the NAACP task force’s findings.

“I don’t detect any kind of hard-line attitude (against a fair share agreement),” he said. “The companies simply don’t feel that they have been approached by anyone with an overall plan before.”