Jewish Group Calls Spike Lee’s Preference Illegal

The American Jewish Congress has called for an investigation of national publications that may have acceded to filmmaker Spike Lee’s preference for being interviewed by an African-American journalist in connection with the upcoming movie “Malcolm X.”

Assigning reporters solely on the basis of race is “patently illegal conduct,” the organization said in urging the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to look into the employment practices of several magazines that assigned black reporters to write about Lee.

Rolling Stone executive editor Robert Wallace said Friday he assigned writer Joe Wood, who is black, to the “Malcolm X” story after being told that Lee “had a rule that he was only letting black reporters on the set in Egypt.”

Despite his reservations about yielding to pressure, Wallace said he went along with Lee’s demand because “we want to use more black writers, so we thought this was a good opportunity . . . It was good for us to be pushed to have an ethnically diverse group of writers.”

Wallace denied that the magazine had violated anti-discrimination laws. “We have a lot more Jewish free-lancers than we have black free-lancers,” he said, responding to the Jewish organization’s allegation. “I don’t think they should be complaining so much.”

Susan Lyne, editor of Premiere Magazine, has previously acknowledged that she went along with Lee’s “heavy sell” to use a black reporter for the magazine’s November cover story on “Malcolm X.”

Lee, who could not be reached Friday, told the New York Times this week that two other publications--Vogue and Interview--had also agreed to put black writers on the story. But although Interview’s November issue contains a piece on Lee by a black writer, Karen Brailsford, the magazine’s executive editor, Graham Fuller, said “the color of her skin had nothing to do with (the assignment).”

“(Lee) never made any such request to us,” Fuller said. “If he had made a request, we would have listened to him, but we don’t give (subjects) writer approval.”

At Vogue, which published a story about Lee by John Edgar Wideman, a black novelist, in its November issue, editors have said the film maker had no hand in selecting him.