Time to Get Involved

Two widely known merchants last week crisply advised their fellow retailers that it is time to get more deeply involved in civil rights. In New York, in a sharp speech delivered at the National Retail Merchants Association convention, Charles Y. Lazarus told his colleagues that they must personally take a part in the urban crisis that has storekeepers "living on a volcano." And Neiman-Marcus President Stanley Marcus announced that henceforth civil rights will be as important a factor as price, quality or delivery time in what his six Texas specialty stores in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston buy.

Salutary Effect. Specifically, said Marcus in a letter to 9,000 suppliers, Neiman-Marcus intends to deal as much as possible with firms who hire and train more people from minorities. "We would rather do business with a company which is actively and sincerely pursuing a policy of equal opportunity than to continue to do business with one which is not," he said. "The Federal Government requires that every one of its suppliers of goods and services certifies that it is an equal-opportunity employer. We believe a private company should do no less."

Neiman-Marcus is one of the first retailers to take such a step in the area of buying practices, and civil rights groups responded approvingly. "The announcement will have a salutary effect," said John A. Morsell, assistant executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. "Assuring equal employment opportunity cannot be made the exclusive business of government, and one would think that businessmen would insist upon a major role for business also." Some retailers were less enthusiastic. "This type of action should not fall into the private sector," said Martin B. Kohn, chairman of Baltimore's Hochschild, Kohn & Co. and president of the National Retail Merchants Association.

Kohn thus saw the situation differently from convention Speaker Lazarus, president of F. & R. Lazarus & Co. of Columbus, Ohio, and one of the famed Lazarus family that controls giant Federated Department Stores. Lazarus reminded fellow merchants that one-third of all U.S. unemployed are in the 20 largest metropolitan areas where the biggest U.S. department stores also happen to be based. "They are not at the level of everybody else," he said of this hard core. "That is why, in many cases, they are unemployed. So we have got to say we will hire them; that we will literally create jobs."

What the retailers had in mind was more than the principle of equality--being right on civil rights is good business. And beyond that, they know that failing to act could mean trouble.

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