NAACP Blasts Relations Unit

NAACP Blasts Relations Unit

The executive board of the Ann Arbor National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) today called for replacement of the present Human Relations Commission because “the commission as presently constituted does not enjoy nor does it deserve the confidence of the Ann Arbor Negro community".

In a letter sent to commission chairman, Paul Wagner, the NAACP charged the commission with failure to forward human relations and for acting as “a buffer to protect the City Council from cluttering its agenda with human relations issues”. It announced that the organization will no longer deal with such "buffers".

The NAACP announced that it would resume picketing of City Hall at all council meetings and city related functions to back up its demands for an entirely new organization of the Human Relations Commission enlarged to 15 members, all actively concerned with improving human relations, of whom seven or eight would be Negroes.

The NAACP said that it does not look upon the employment of. a full-time human relations director as a sign of progress unless this director has the confidence of civil rights groups in Ann Arbor as well as in his present area of employment.

The group referred to Mayor Cecil O. Creal’s recently proposed appointment to the Human Relations commission as “only the latest of a long series of . . . efforts to by-pass those very groups on which improved human relations depend".