A FIGHT in Color

During Eastman Kodak Co.'s annual meeting last week in Flemington, N.J., 600 demonstrators paraded quietly outside the local high school. "Kodak is out of focus," read one placard. "The poor will win," proclaimed another. Attending the meeting briefly, the demonstration's leader, Negro Clergyman Franklin Delano Roosevelt Florence, 33, stalked angrily out, thundering: "This is not a meeting of stockholders. This is a meeting of racists." All the rancor obscured the fact that the company did record business during 1967's first quarter.

As the biggest employer in Rochester, N.Y. (pop. 300,000), Kodak has been under fire for months from a militant civil rights organization headed by Florence and bearing the acrimonious acronym FIGHT (for Freedom, Integration, God, Honor--Today). Founded after the city's Negro riots in 1964, FIGHT soon insisted that it be allowed to recruit 600 Negroes for training and employment by Kodak. Amid mounting pressure, a Kodak assistant vice president designated to hold talks with FIGHT signed a document last Dec. 20, bowing to its demands. No sooner was that agreement reached, however, than Kodak repudiated it as "unauthorized." The company explained that it could not commit itself in advance to hiring a specific number of workers. Nor would it grant any single organization exclusive recruitment powers. Despite the company's explanations, Kodak's employment policies became an issue that embroiled the city's church and civic leaders. Warned Florence ominously: "What happens in Rochester in the summer of '67 is at the doorstep of Eastman Kodak." At FIGHT'S urging national Methodist, United Church of Christ and Episcopal leaders withheld proxies on church-owned stock from management.

Nobody could be more surprised at the fuss than Kodak itself. Though Negroes make up 13% of the city's population (v. only 3.4% of Kodak's 40,000 employees), many are unskilled workers who have arrived from the South in the past few years. In the face of that influx, Kodak has done its part to hold the unemployment rate at a remarkably low 1.7%; last year alone, the company hired 600 Negroes. But by entering into the Dec. 20 agreement, Kodak undeniably blundered--for which it has apologized publicly time and again.

Presiding over the meeting, Chairman William S. Vaughn made it clear that Kodak had no intention of restoring the agreement. With that, Florence called for a protest pilgrimage of Negroes to Rochester on July 24, the third anniversary of the city's riots. Meanwhile, Kodak has hired a Harlem-based public relations firm, Uptown Associates, to promote its products in "ethnic markets"--apparently in hopes of forestalling any Negro boycott. Otherwise, the company is conducting business as usual. The man who signed the controversial document is still on the job. And Kodak expects to go on quietly recruiting Negro employees through other community agencies that, unlike FIGHT, have asked for no exclusive agreements.

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